A Court of Stars and Darkness
by cryptically
Summary: FeyRhys. Rhys' POV. Begins during Feyre's time Under the Mountain and continues after ACOTAR as Rhys rebuilds the Night Court. A master manipulator, Rhys is only too willing to dupe Amarantha and her court for his master plan. But falling for the girl in love with Tamlin could destroy everything Rhys has been fighting for. Currently ACOMAF in Rhys' POV.
1. devil-may-care

**Author's Note** : Hey! This is my first ACOTAR fanfic (hope you like it!). I really want to explore why Rhys acted the way he did when we last see him in in ACOTAR, so hopefully this fanfic will answer that. The first few chapters will mirror the book, and then I'll write what I think happens next (woo Night Court!).

I'm shamelessly FeyRhys, but I'm going to try to keep this as non-OOC and canon as possible, so fair warning: there may also be some FeyTam in here later for things to make sense. Also, huge **_spoilers for ACOTAR_** , but chances are you've probably read the whole book anyway. This first chapter is kind of slow, but the next one should be fun.

Hope you enjoy,

-cy.

* * *

It's Fire Night when he first sees her, this mortal girl so out of place.

She has brown-gold hair and is trying very hard to act like she belongs here- firm steps, chin held high, voice cool and assured- but her recoiling from the touch of the three faeries gives her away in an instant.

He is not a High Lord for nothing, and in the Night Court picking up on the subtlest signs is what saves your life.

Her attempts to shake the faeries off are clumsy and untutored, and when he comes to her it's less to play the savior and more to amuse himself.

It's Fire Night, and he's sick of pageantry.

What he wants isn't the crowd's emotions: excitement crackling up in cinnamon sparks, lust beating in a lush and savory drumline. He wants the rarer ones, this girl's fear shivering in violin strands under his tongue. Bonfire smoke and the scent of cider curls around him as the Spring magic replenishes itself.

Oh, he will enjoy this.

He loops a hand around her shoulder, proprietary, and his mouth tilts up when her shoulders hunch under his hand. "There you are. I was looking for you."

When her eyes meet his, Rhysand suppresses a shiver. The first rule of survival is to give nothing away.

But even so, her eyes surprise him. They're feral, hunter's eyes, eyes that calculate the distance to a creek or a rock, that take in his beauty and weigh out his danger in a blink. She insists she came with friends. He knows it's a lie, can smell and taste it. The three faeries skitter off when he dismisses them, and Rhys laughs when the girl asks if he's part of the Spring Court.

"Are you sure you're meant to be here?" He tips his head back to the sky, savoring the procession of stars. "Your friends have told you so little about our culture."

She crosses her arms. "I know enough."

"Enough to avoid ending up in a compromising position at the start of the Great Rite? Somehow I doubt it. Believe me, mortal girl," he leans in close to her and smells honeysuckle and apple blossoms, Spring magic, as he whispers, "now is not the night to rely on the better nature of the Fae. Tonight is when the monsters come out of their cages."

Gaze hooded, she backs up, light on her feet. "Does that mean you're one of them? One of the monsters?"

"Oh, we're all monsters. But if you're asking if I'm one of the especially bad ones, the ones you humans whisper stories about in the night, well." Rhys allows a sliver of darkness to claw its way into his eyes. "Perhaps you'd like to accompany me on a tour of the festivities and decide for yourself."

She swallows, her mouth a fat smear of peach as she trots out the standard, conversation-ender, "Enjoy the Rite."

He shouldn't watch her back flit through the crowd, shouldn't trace the thin thread of her anxiety until it disappears with her under the drone of drums and the frenzy. Ashes flicker up into the heavens, and Rhys stands by himself. Has he really just be turned down by a mortal girl? Him, a High Lord?

He sniffs, more out of annoyance than to taste the magic again. Amarantha's price for him leaving from Under the Mountain tonight was steep, and he's already struck out. A mortal girl shouldn't affect him so- not his hard-won reprieve, not when this one night cost him so much to arrange in the first place.

Rhys straightens his dark tunic, and swirls once more into the crowd, beckoning a masked faerie into the darkness. She, at least, laughs and follows.

He is not losing his touch.

-o-

He does not think about the mortal girl again until he strips Lucien's glamour from her in Tamlin's parlor.

"I wish I could say this was surprising." Rhys schools the rage out of his countenance. "But I've told enough mortal girls I not to get into trouble to know that they tend to do the exact opposite."

The fox informs him that the girl's his lover. Rhys rolls his eyes, sweeping Lucien away with a wave. His talon curls lazily into her mind, half out of spite for the glamour, and half...

Her eyes shake with fury and fear, but she does not cry out.

"You're trying so hard not to let your terror show." He muses. "How utterly enjoyable."

"Let her go, Rhys." Tamlin growls. "This is over."

"It's over," Rhys breathes, sifting through her emotions casually, "when I decide it is. Or did you forget about that as well when you settled back down in this Cauldron-scalded manor?"

Her memories curl over his fingers and her thoughts are so insidious he wants to swim in them. And suddenly Tamlin's whole plan reveals itself: bite marks, a faerie-wolf slain, a huntress, hate scabbing into love. Rhys says enough to humiliate all of them-because how dare they glamour him, attempt to fool him when he was the one who taught them everything about legerdemain and shadows.

He didn't expect them to stay friends and battle comrades, but he expected better than this.

He runs his hand through her mind one last time, and lets go. "It's too bad, really. You finally decide to play the game, and you'll lose your winning hand as final bets are called. She would have been the one to do it, too." He stopped having pity for Tamlin, for all of them, when the Night Court was forced to barter with Amarantha.

But to be able to break the curse, to set things up so that Tamlin would kill his Lady Under the Mountain...that might be promising.

The girl tells him her name is Clare Beddor, and Rhys inclines his head. "I'll send Amarantha your regards."

A plan crooks into motion in his head.

-o-

Her name, of course, isn't Clare Beddor because the real Clare Beddor is hanging from the rafters in Amarantha's throne room.

Before them, the girl from Fire Night and Tamlin's parlor is standing square-shouldered, demanding to claim Tamlin. Rhys' own shoulders ache and he shifts to flex them when as few people as possible in the room are watching him. No one has sympathy for Amarantha's whore, after all, and he would not have survived this long if he had not long learned how to hide his weaknesses.

It's when Amarantha summons him forward that the girl finally looks at him again. Her eyes go wide a moment, prey scenting predator. Rhys allows her one contemptuous smirk. Of course he recognized her. Of course he knew she wasn't the person she said she was.

He still needed a living girl to bring back, though. And it wasn't like Tamlin had spoken up to save the false girl either. Rhys had hoped that Amarantha would not have made him extract the name from Lucien by holding his mind, but it was always a possibility.

At least Rhys could make the death quick.

He could not promise much now that all seven of the High Lords had fallen Under the Mountain, but pain he could cut short. His hands tighten in Lucien's mind as the fox continues his silence.

And then the girl speaks. "Feyre! My name is Feyre."

Rhys loosens his grip on Lucien's mind and lets the girl's name wash over him like a wind's current. Feyre, an old name.

Amarantha seals the terms of their contract and read the riddle, twice. While the Attor attacks her, Rhys' mind wanders through the riddle and solves it. Love, of course. The hard part will be getting that human girl, that Feyre, to listen to him long enough for him to pass her the answer if she wasn't clever enough to solve it already.

That's when Amarantha forbids any of them from helping her with the riddle.

Rhys' hands twist themselves into knots in his pockets. Fine. Then his loophole will be helping her in her other challenge. It's all in the wording of the contracts, after all, and this one was sloppy.

The guards drag her body down the hall, her golden hair catching the firelight again. Feyre is so stark and slender, a glass knife: lethal but infinitely breakable. Tsking and walking back through the hall to his own quarters, he hopes she's stronger than she looks. Thus far, he's unimpressed.

In a secluded hallway, a High Fae from the Autumn Court passes him and whispers that he is the worst kind of whore.

Rhys doesn't break stride. He has heard and endured many more, much worse things than that.

And he remains unimpressed.


	2. deal and debt

**Author's Note:** Thanks for the sweet reviews, guys! I'll try to update this fairly regularly when I get breaks from my summer job. This chapter's a little longer than the last one, so enjoy! Next up is some unexpected consequences of their deal... -cy.

* * *

"She's a hunter." Rhys whispers along Amarantha's hair as it scrapes her bare shoulder. "She prides herself on it, perhaps more than any other skill."

They're in bed together, the sheets knotted up around their legs. His body is aggressively sore, but at least his natural healing is kicking in again. Amarantha wasn't vicious tonight. There are other nights when she is and he hurts too much to move. Tonight, it just stings for a while, then fades.

She's bored with him, and that's the only reason she lets him heal.

"A hunter." Amarantha purrs and stretches. "What a foolish thing to still pride herself on, when it was her hunting that drew her into Tamlin's web."

"You pride yourself on your tactical prowess, which could be said to have done much of the same."

Amarantha's neck stiffens under his mouth. "Because I, unlike her, am the most skilled at my chosen profession. I am the greatest general Prythian has ever seen and it's not flattery or arrogance, but fact. Even you, from the most cutthroat of all the Courts, must be able to recognize that."

She presses a hand into an as-yet-unhealed patch of his skin, and Rhys suppresses a flinch. Amarantha lives for the flinch, the involuntary shudder of pain when his body goes out of his control. _Someday_ , she's told him, _I will control every part of you._

So he does not let her have the satisfaction of a flinch. Because once she learns that she can make you react on command, that's it. Game over. The fun's gone out of the sport, and you become one more used-up lover before she finds someone new to take to bed.

And if that happens, he'll become useless.

"I do," Rhys says, draping kisses on her neck. "And you're right. But isn't it all the more rewarding to break her of that pride in public?"

Amarantha laughs in a low alto. "Humiliation is always near and dear to my heart."

"You lull her into a false sense of security with a hunt." Rhys says. "It builds her up before tearing her down. And is it not always more gratifying to take down an enemy at their strongest?"

"Ah, and I suppose that you've learned from personal experience." She laughs again, though her eyes have a cruel twist. "Though whether it's been at my hand or someone else's I'm not sure. Still, I'm intrigued. I almost forget you used to study war half as well as you dabbled in crooked court politics."

He inclines his head. "The Night Court will be flattered to hear you compare it so, my Lady."

She tuts, a dismissive single-syllable laugh. "You and your mockery of a Court. Leave me. I'll make plans for the first task and summon you again when I get bored." She waves a hand, as though remembering at the last moment. "Your pay is on the end table."

It has been this way for years.

Once, when Amarantha was beginning to solidify her power and Tamlin had not yet settled back into his manor as High Lord, Amarantha had come to the Night Court with a proposition: pay for a limited servitude with gold and allegiance or become her slaves by force. Rhys had not found the decision particularly hard. He emptied the Night Court's treasury, knowing they would not win against her once his magic had been sealed, and hoped that their mountains of coin would earn them favor Under the Mountain.

And in some ways, it was a success. Some nights, when he sees his subjects sneaking out to the night sky during a quiet moment, to say nothing of the Night Court fae who still roam free, he even feels like he got the better of that deal. Some nights, when he has to clutch the hallway walls back to his room, unable to step through shadow or see straight, he has to remind himself it was worth it.

He slips back into his tunic and pants, and on the table by the door is a single gold coin.

At the end of each night with her, she pays him one coin back from the sum she demanded forty-nine years ago. For forty-nine years he has quietly been warming her bed and saving them. He does not yet have more than a small fraction of his Court's treasury back, but it's something. Amarantha said when she first called him to her personal rooms that she would delight in bringing him to his knees, to humiliating him beyond reprieve and finding his pride's breaking point.

Rhys picks up the gold piece and pockets it.

But he has not broken, not once. And if this is how he saves the Night Court, one coin bought by flesh and agony night after night at a time, then so be it.

He will endure.

-o-

On the day of the first task, there are gamblers and spectators crowding the arena in a desperate throng. With all seven faerie courts trapped Under the Mountain, it's not surprising that such a spectacle draws them: there's not much to do besides gossip and snipe politically at each other when entertainment isn't provided.

Rhys tucks his hands into his tunic and weaves through the crowd, plucking out the exasperated bitterness, a dull legato with a bite at the coda, that belies his favorite bookkeeper. There are others he could use, but not all of Amarantha's betmasters are so amenable to catering to her whore, and he'd like to keep this as covert and orderly as possible.

"Well," the bookie says to him, rubbing her chin as she does the numbers again, "you are facing some pretty astronomical odds here. You understand that, right?"

Rhys winks and asks to be put down for an even larger sum.

"All right, your funeral, High Lord." She marks it down. "I hope you know what you're doing."

-o-

The Middengard squirms through the labyrinth, and Rhys is tapping the arm of his chair, doing everything in is power to make it look like he's lost interest.

"The mortal girl is so pitiful." Some High Fae from the box below them howls. "Look at how she wallows in the mud and muck."

She is building a trap. Rhys had watched with some interest as Feyre first snapped the bones of Amarantha's older victims and stabbed them into the murk. The crowd, of course, had roared with laughter: she's gone insane, that poor huntress is losing her mind, she's done for. Rhys too had smiled, but for a different reason.

When she slops mud over herself, he leans forward despite himself. The Fae laugh and jeer again, but he's fascinated. "She's just become invisible."

Amarantha's nose wrinkles. "There are still many ways for our mighty hunter to fall."

And she's correct. The worm sneaks up on Feyre, even as she covers herself. Invisible or not, she can still be crushed by its massive weight if the worm doesn't outright kill her.

Rhys' hand taps faster than he means it to. He'd planned on her being able to make it through this challenge without his help and thus far she'd succeeded. But this was not something he could expect her to pick up on. No mortal had senses that good; he couldn't fault her for getting killed like this, it just happens. Someone needs to alert her, someone needs to help.

He doesn't realize he's stopped tapping until Lucien cries out "To your left!" and the whole arena goes silent, then deafening.

-o-

Tamlin's champion is curled in her cell, staring at a vomit-filled corner like it's a mirage winking in and out. Rhys' lip curls.

Sure, she won, but her left arm hangs uselessly at her side and all the color has fled her body and collected in her cheeks. By turns, Feyre sweats and shivers, struggling to place him when she hears his feet on the cobblestones of her cell.

"Black spots in your vision already?" Rhys tsks. "I'd hoped for more fortitude from the girl who made me a such a grand fortune tonight."

None else had bet on her. There was a part of him that swelled, reeled from the calculation that he had a little under half the Night Court's gold back now. But now a larger part cringed. This girl would do no one any good hunched over her knees, unable to see clearly let alone defend herself. And since Lucien had very conveniently been captured after his outburst, saving the day fell to Rhys.

"Get." Feyre huffs, as though each word costs her something. "Get away from me. Leave."

"Let me see your arm." He reaches for it, but she must see well enough still to notice motion because she recoils.

She looks like a fallen star, all dark tendrils of hair and blood, shattered light and glass bones.

Rhys kneels in front of her and takes her by the chin so she has to meet his eyes. "You are dying. Let me help."

She shakes, weakly, but he holds her still.

"You are dying," he continues, "and it will be painful. You know this. Perhaps you don't want to show weakness in front of me, and for that monumental and stupid bravado I commend you. But as someone who has just out-gambled every faerie in this court, allow me to share a secret about being lucky. Don't take bets you know without a doubt you will lose."

Feyre's eyes flash, an ember in soot. "Leave."

"You are pitting your earthly time against how quickly Lucien can escape from the guards. How long do you think it will take to punish him? I have some ideas. Do you imagine you can survive that long?"

"I will." She pushes herself onto her forearms, then into a wobbly sit. "I will last as long as I have to. Without making deals with someone like you."

Rhys' mouth quirks. "Fine. Have it your way, champion of the Spring Court." He bows. "My offer expires when I leave this room. I'll tell you this for free, though: endurance for arrogance's sake is worthless."

He summons shadow into his palm and it licks along the edges of his shoulders. For a moment, he's worried she's not going to stop him, but once he has a trouser leg swallowed by darkness, she licks her lips and says, "Wait. One week."

Rhys smiles, all dark stars and wild magic, and grabs her arm. "Deal."

Unfortunately, Feyre faints before he gets the spiky taste of metal out of his mouth (which is too bad because Rhys has always thought it's especially fun to watch him draw a deal on) but he works quickly, setting the bone, nudging the blood back into its normal routes, and dispelling the cloud of infection clustering the wound. He lazily traces out the symbol on her left arm and palm, spiraling blue-black designs with a cat's eye in the center.

He steps back, appraising his work. Feyre's clothes and body are still sopped in worm guts and mud, and Rhys wrinkles his nose. He waves a hand in her direction, a blink and she's clean. No use having his trump card catch sickness from herself and, Cauldron boil him, with her luck that would happen. He glowers at one corner of the cell, and just to be safe, vanishes the barf as well.

"What have you done?" Feyre's voice is stronger, angrier as she holds her left arm out like it's something foreign.

He keeps smiling. "Welcome back."

"What is this?"

"Do you mean the ceremonial marking of our bargain?" Rhys shrugs, as infuriatingly as he can. Let her hate him. Hate is a powerful motivator, he should know. "It's a custom in the Night Court. I hope you realize how privileged you are to enjoy it, mortal."

"Can you make it less visible?" She says it soft, like an animal knowing it's caught in a trap but not committed to accepting its fate.

"So your Tamlin won't see it?" Rhys lets the shadows curl over him again. "Of course not. That would hardly make it any fun."

Her rage echoes through the cell as he turns himself into darkness and slips back out.


	3. wolves and deer

He probably should have expected to find Feyre in his room eventually. The castle servants are famous for turning on the weakest of Amarantha's guests.

What he doesn't expect is to find her in soot up to her elbows, ashes streaked over her face and raccooning under her eyes from where she wiped sweat away.

"Well, this is pleasant." Rhys says after his shadows have dispersed and he lies on his unused bed with his boots still on. The stance of her shoulders tightens. "Normally when I return here, I expect to be alone."

Feyre's eyes flash with something fiercer than exhaustion. "No one else seems to think that."

He's already had to see the High Lady of the Autumn Court and talk with her about the favor Feyre did her son in not withholding her name. Amarantha would not have cared much either way if Lucien had or hadn't spoken; Lucien is small fry for a High Fae, and to Amarantha those are happily expendable. So Rhys reminded Autumn's High Lady of the circumstances and her debt to Feyre for her son's life, pointed her toward a long and dirty hallway, and left it at that.

"Then I see my reputation precedes me." Rhys sits up with a smile that doesn't quite meet his eyes. "I don't suppose you have an actual reason for being here?"

"I'm picking up lentils." Feyre shows him the bucket, full almost to the brim with tiny seed-shaped beans. "They told me this room belonged to a faerie who would tear me in half if I weren't done by the time he came back."

She says it so deadpan that he's not sure if she's joking or telling him something she actually dreaded happening. Rhys scowls. He's the chess piece maneuvering through this game by playing as close to the edge as he can get. There is little enough room for errors on his part already.

And yet, he still sweeps back out into the hallway in a storm of capes and black fabric, and finds the servants in question. He takes one faerie by the collar, not hard or rough enough to lift them off the ground, but with enough grip in his hand to insinuate his ability to damage. Rhys speaks soft enough so Feyre won't hear but his voice is malice. "This was not done well."

The faerie spits. "It was an order from our Lady."

"Our Lady and mistress is generous." Rhys says, squeezing slightly harder. "I am not."

The faerie coughs and wriggles back. "You can't order us not to obey her."

"As I recall, Lady Amarantha's bargain involved chores, not impossible housekeeping. She would not enjoy someone taking pain from her captive without telling her." Rhys trails off in thought, just enough for the faerie he's holding to imagine their punishment. "But, so long as the mortal gets fed, I might have a lapse in memory. I've heard hot meals are good for making you forget things."

"You're wasting your time, Night Lord. That mortal's just a plaything." The other faerie spits.

"Ah, but she's a plaything who's made me so much money." Rhys grins. "And I like to take good care of those."

The first faerie shakes off his hand. "I suppose you'd have learned from the best, whore."

They leave, snickering, as Rhys slips back into his quarters.

"It still hurts you, doesn't it?" Feyre nods her head at the open door.

Cautious, Rhys takes his time inspecting the rest of the fireplace for lentils. "Mortals can't hear that well."

"I'm a huntress." She says, leaning against the door, watching him. "It's hard not to pick out who's predator and who's prey when you know how to look."

Rhys steps in close, too close, touches her face and vanishes the dirt from it and from her clothes as he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. He shifts partially, bat wings and taloned hands and feet, enough to haunt her when she looks at shadows for weeks. "Tell me again how much you think I look like prey." He says, sweeping a hand over her mind and watching her shiver. "And I will be only too delighted to show you how deadly even my limited arsenal can be."

Night magic is a subtle magic, something you feel happening but can't place entirely until it's too late, like the feeling of falling asleep. Rhys lets go of her mind, and Feyre visibly relaxes. He shifts back.

His magic works like he does, at the edges of consciousness and the dark spaces between blinks, dangerous and quick.

"And to answer your question from before," Rhys runs a finger along her cheek to her chin, "no, it doesn't. You're losing your touch, I'm afraid. It's a poor hunter that can't tell the wolf from the deer."

"I never said you were prey." Feyre swallows but holds her ground. "And I have a reputation for being good at spotting wolves."

Rhys steps back, even though it should be her recoiling from his touch. "So they tell me, Feyre, darling."

He takes her back to her cell and does not think about deer and wolves again.

-o-

There is useful pain and then there is pain for indulgence.

Rhys' fingers grasp along the walls of the corridor, finding purchase in the mortar between the slabs of stone blocks. He's not sure where tonight falls in that spectrum between purpose and show, but he is hurt enough that not knowing the answer immediately doesn't bother him.

It's all for Amarantha's indulgence anyway. He certainly isn't caught up in this cycle because he likes it. He just can't stop falling back into it: long nights, late evenings with dance and drinks and the promise of tactics, secrets, his gut warning him, then kisses and a too-familiar room, ash and blood.

To stop doing it would be to make himself useless, and to be useless here is to die.

It takes him a few tries with the lock on his door. Rhys hates this door. He doesn't even sleep in this room most nights and the door always sticks when he's not in shadow form. He exhales gratefully when it opens without a servant scrambling up the hall and asking why the High Lord of the Night Court is leaving a trail of blood on the rugs behind him.

He'll fix it after he fixes himself, go back along his route and make the evidence of his passage disappear, blood streaks and struggle and all.

For now, he locks the door and eases his tunic off.

Some nights with Amarantha are nothing more than what he did on the war bands before Tamlin and Lucien were old enough to learn from him: the slow seduction of tantalizingly aloof High Fae, figuring out what bedrooms at which Court were safest to wake up in, who in the places his band visited was interested enough in him but posed the toughest challenge to romance.

Those nights with her are almost enjoyable.

The other nights are intervals of possession. He is less the pursuer and more the pursued those nights, and all the charm in the world cannot save him.

But if this is what lets him have his modicum of power, then it's not a price he's too proud to pay. Rhys sucks in a breath.

The ash rod splintered on his back again and there are small burrs embedded along his shoulder blades. Some he can feel better than he can see, his magic failing to rub out their scars like the wrong sides of a magnet pressed together. This is what anchors him to human form, prevents him melting into shadow and letting them fall out.

Like all the other nights when he returns like this, he'll have to extract them by hand.

His fingers shake along the curve of his shoulder so much he almost doesn't notice the warmth of the bond pulling for his attention through his hand. Rhys sighs, and throws a shadow over one wall of his bedroom with a wave and within it, Feyre's face swims into focus. She's dead-eyed and when she talks, it's like she's speaking to him even though Rhys is fairly sure she hasn't worked out everything the eye tattoo on her palm does.

 _I can't keep this up,_ she says.

He sniffs, wincing as he pulls out the first splinter. It's not like he can keep his own facades up forever either, but that's not how this game works. You don't always have to be strong. If he leaves this ash in him too long, his body won't be able to clot the wounds around the splinters, burrs, and brambles, and Rhys will either get infected or slowly bleed out. You just have to be strong when it matters.

 _I just want it to go back to when it was easy._ Feyre is lying down on the straw in her cell, talking soft enough so that the guards won't hear her, talking to a facsimile of an eye because she can't trust anyone here. _And that's awful, but it's the truth. That I miss being able to wake up without my heart pounding or always remembering how many days it's been since a full moon. I miss Tamlin.  
_

He can tell her exactly how many days, weeks, months it's been since he last flew in open sky. Most of the time now Rhys travels with the darkness, stepping through shadow so that none of Amarantha's minions can report him flying. Somethings you love so much that you cut them out entirely so they're easier for you to protect. He understands what Tamlin is doing, even as he mocks him for it.

Two more burrs drop into the basin of his sink.

 _But I did this. I did this, and it's my fault, and I'll fix it._

Rhys' hands quake as he washes off the ash-tinged blood with the wet scraps of his old tunic. Sometimes he is so revolted seeing his own skin after nights with her and shame burns so low in his gut when faeries of his own court whisper in shadows they hope he won't hear about how they wonder if he's still fit to lead them after this that he wonders why he's even trying anymore.

It's just-

 _Exhausting._ Feyre finishes for him, her eyes drooping closed. _It's exhausting keeping this up. At least with my family there were good moments. Sometimes we laughed and I could forget about all the horrible things I was doing to keep us alive._

Rhys plucks out the last bramble, and grips the sides of the sink for support. Done, all done. His magic courses freely through his veins, unobstructed and hobbling his healing along.

 _But this...I can't even stop dreaming about this._ Feyre murmurs to the eye tattoo in her cell as she falls asleep. _Some nights all I want is to forget._

Gingerly, he shucks the ruined tunic into the fire and finds another one. They are both caught in the same trap, but there is at least something he can do.

-o-

Two of his retainers dress Feyre in traditional Night Court garb, flowing gossamer fabric in layers that are more translucent than not, and paint swirls along her skin at his request. Rhys had said that he was collecting early on his deal with her, and while that's only half the reason it was a convenient enough one that Feyre bought it.

The other reason was that Amarantha had announced to him in the hallway earlier today (in front of her entourage) that he needn't bother coming to her Midsummer party because she'd already found another escort.

It didn't take a genius to know it would be Tamlin. Ever since Feyre had accepted her tasks, Amarantha had split her time between Tamlin and Rhys. Tamlin she enjoyed because she could watch for the first cracks form in his blank demeanor, and Rhys she had been waiting to break a long time. Perhaps too long to be worthwhile anymore. The court swirled with rumors of Rhys' replacement, and after her brush-off it had been all he could do to bow nonchalantly and assure her that he'd bring suitable company.

And really, what more suitable company than the mortal girl in love with Tamlin?

It would almost be perfect, the jealous lover bringing another jealous lover with him, if Rhys felt that way about Amarantha at all.

He leads Feyre to one of the banquet tables coated out in silks and crystal dishes. Though Feyre may be uncomfortable in her dress, she unquestionably looks like she belongs at that party. Which is more than Rhys can say for Tamlin, well-dressed and as stoic by the throne as though he was a statue.

Rhys imagines he will enjoy this celebration more than Amarantha.

Still, if Feyre wasn't already livid in coming here and being so coolly greeted by Amarantha, she certainly is when Rhys presents her with a goblet.

"No." Feyre says, quiet enough to hide her dissent and make it look like a normal, albeit uncomfortable conversation, but strong enough to get the point across.

It's faerie wine, of course, and she knows this. Someone's probably warned her about it, whether it's a legend she'd heard or a friend here.

But no one truly has friends in Amarantha's court: they just have people they're more willing and less willing to sacrifice to get what they want.

"Doesn't some part of you crave oblivion?" Rhys whispers into her ear. "Drink, Feyre."

Her eyes meet his over the crown of the goblet, as fierce and cold as woods in winter, and she drinks it, for the same reason he makes her do it: because they are both desperate players in a desperate game with an astonishingly small number of things they won't sacrifice to get what they want.

* * *

 **Author's Note:** Thanks for reading, and hope you guys enjoyed the longer chapter! It means a lot to me that people have liked this so much, and I'm going to try to knock the next one out over the weekend (woo!). I'm excited! Some hints for chapter four: the second task, tear-licking, mind-shattering, blood orange gowns, and...possibly a kiss?! :D


	4. careless

He supposes he could have been gentler with the faerie wine, but perhaps not. The only time when he's allowed to be kind is when he can hide it convincingly enough. And sometimes there are too many people watching to be kind.

Rhys kneels down next to Feyre in her cell once the guards have left them alone, raising a hand to her face.

"Did you enjoy your taste of oblivion?" He whispers in her ear. Feyre's eyelashes flutter shut against his skin and she shivers.

Then she throws up.

"Cauldron boil this. All of it." Rhys sweeps himself up and storms around her, throwing the sharpness out of his movements before he crouches down again to hold her hair out of the way as Feyre is sick. "You're so fragile and I wish you weren't."

He waits until she has exhausted herself before vanishing the vomit from her clothes and face. The guards no doubt heard her down the hall; he'll have to leave something vile behind for show. But he can at least save her some embarrassment, even as he vanishes back into shadow, back into familiar hallways.

"Done toying with your mortal plaything?" Amarantha strokes a hand through the shadows that carry him through the stone hallways. Funny how they never call him a prince or a Queen's consort or even her escort, no, he is always, always her whore.

"It was only appropriate." Rhys steps out of the darkness and back onto solid ground, shadows slithering off his skin. "An opportunity would have been missed if we didn't both bring half of a pair of sad lovers."

She laughs and slings an arms around his shoulders, her lips skating over his collarbone. "As soon as Tamlin cracks, my dear Rhysand, I will so enjoy disposing of you."

He smiles in a way that doesn't meet his eyes, and pulls her down the hallway to their room.

"Then let's hope he's not so easily broken."

-o-

The blood orange gown makes Feyre's skin brighter. There's only so much Rhys'll let her see before he has her drink the wine, and the past few times it's been easier to get her to. Feyre will glance at Tamlin, who stoically looks back, and then down the contents of the goblet before she can second-guess herself.

And perhaps that is what oblivion truly is, forgetting enough of the bad things that you stop feeling guilty for not doing anything about them.

At first Rhys had wanted Feyre at the parties to secure his position with Amarantha, to both explain the mark and his continued association with the prisoner. The first rule of being in power is that it's much harder to kill someone who only and always tells you the truth.

But tonight is different. Rhys has so many strategies and plans he can lose himself in them, and this is a scenario he has prepared for, but had hoped he would not have to be a part of.

"Rhysand." Amarantha gestures him forward through the crowd. "We require your skills."

Rhys gives Feyre a look to stay on the edge of the crowd. The less noticeable she is, the better things will go.

A Summer Court High Fae is sprawled on the floor in the center of the throne room, just under Clare Beddor's hanging body. Rhys doesn't allow his expression to shift, even though his stomach contorts. Idiots for getting caught. Idiots for not planning better, for not having a better escape plan than to run as fast as they could.

This is what happens when you try and fail to win against the Queen Under the Mountain.

This is how it ends.

"Shatter him." Amarantha says.

And Rhys does.

He knows exactly what she means by this command, shatter the mind not the body, but he does it anyway, destroying everything in a neat slash of blood and nerves. When he walks back, the shimmer of talons around his hand keep everyone except for Feyre at bay.

"This is what I am." He tells her and hands her the goblet. "Deer or wolf, Feyre darling?"

He downs his, and the edges of his vision blur. He doesn't even have to ask her to drink.

And that, he supposes, is her answer.

-o-

Maybe it's the faerie wine. Maybe he's had too much. Maybe it's being so close to the second task, shattering someone's mind he didn't want to.

Maybe it's all of these things, but mostly it's Feyre. He pulls her close so that she dances between his legs, shimmies on his lap, never touching her more than on her arms or waist.

But there are moments when he wants to.

It's not hard to see that she was a huntress once. There are muscles corded under her skin, tensing and untensing as she sways, turned flexible by the wine. He can see how she survived in a wilderness that meant to kill her. But her skin itself is soft, uncalloused, like it's been a while since she trained so hard and some of the muscles have begun to lose their harsh edges.

"You can stop." Rhys says, lazily and loudly enough for the guests around him to hear, and he pulls her into his lap.

But still, even under the forgetful influence of faerie wine, Feyre's heavy eyes quest toward the throne for Tamlin.

"Stop." Rhys strokes her hair, pulling her closer as she sits. Then, he says lower, "Stop always looking at him or you'll give us away."

Maybe it really is the faerie wine affecting him too much, because he can't stop himself before he speaks quiet into the crescent curve of her ear, in a lapse he only forgives himself for because she won't remember it:

"Stay here instead."

-o-

The bets will win him less this time because other faeries have wised up to gambling on the mortal girl. It keeps things interesting, Rhys tells himself, making the arrangements with his usual bookkeeper. Feyre will win him another portion of his Court's treasury back again, putting him about at two-thirds of the original, and it will annoy Amarantha to no end.

He's almost amused when it's Lucien in there, even though he should be terrified. Rhys publicly outed himself as Feyre's other healer, the other faerie who disobeyed the Queen Under the Mountain, and Amarantha's warning is clear: cross her at your own risk.

But he has narrowly avoided her displeasure before, and he will do it again.

The audience, of course, would likely have loved him being down there even more than Lucien. The High Lord of the Night Court, stuck in a cage as a mortal girl puzzles out a simple children's riddle. Rhys yawns, deflecting a frisson of rage. She's handled the Worm. She can take this.

He's about to lean back and get ready to stand and applaud when he notices that Feyre has yet to make her move. Her eyes flick between the levers, and a white sheen of panic scrapes through their bond.

She doesn't know the answer. Rhys snorts, willing her to concentrate. She's good at that, isn't she? But this is different, and he doesn't have to interpret the fear and humiliation cutting up his palm in order to know what it means.

Feyre can't read.

He's not sure if she's realized what the eye on her hand can do. No doubt she's connected it to him, but there was still a part of her that trusted it enough or was desperate enough for companionship that she talked to it, told him stories as she fell asleep without meaning to. If he acts now, all that is over. He'll pull the bond tight enough that they'll forever be eavesdropping on each other's unguarded thoughts and there won't be any going back.

Feyre goes for the wrong lever.

Seething, Rhys pulls the bond taut and sends a shot of pain to her arm. _Stop._

They have to repeat this several times before Feyre chooses the third lever, the tattooed eye on her palm narrowing and occasionally rolling with exasperation when she keeps trying to go for the middle lever. What's so special about the number two anyway? There were three grasshoppers at the start, and there are three grasshoppers at the end, it makes sense. But still Rhys sighs despite his blank expression when she pulls the last lever and the array of spikes above her and Lucien holds steady.

Feyre drops to her knees, stock still, and beside him Rhys can sense Amarantha's satisfaction radiating off of her. _No._

The worst thing you can do in front of her is to break. Show her a crack of weakness and she'll widen it into a door and push through.

Rhys plays with the hem of his tunic, bored, as he relates the instructions that have saved his life. _Don't let her see you cry. Put your hands at your sides and stand up. Don't give her the satisfaction of seeing you break._

He nudges some of his magic through their bond, a small burst into Feyre's body to push her to stand, to look Amarantha in the eye and not back down. _Good,_ he tells her. Pain and humiliation are no strangers to him, and he parts through them neatly. How many times has it been him telling this to himself, a small voice in the back of his head willing himself not to break, to show no fear, to remain impassive as she tore through his skin or his subjects? _No tears, wait until you're back in your cell._

He tells her to count to ten.

He tells her to be expressionless for as long as she's certain there are people watching her.

He whispers every secret trick he's learned for survival to her through their bond: chin high, turn quick, don't stop walking. She does it, all of it, even though he can hear her thoughts coming apart at the seams, aching for Tamlin and hating herself for not being able to do it on her own. And he's there, talking softly in the shadowy parts of her head, telling her that she's doing so well, that she's done perfectly until at last she reaches the cell and Rhys lets her go, easing the thread between them back to looseness and leaving her to privacy and her tears.

-o-

He lies on his own bed. Amarantha wanted someone else to take her frustrations out on tonight, and he can't say that he's ungrateful for it. His body may heal quickly, but other pieces of him don't. The part of himself he has to cultivate to be able to walk without reserve about the palace Under the Mountain, that rogue confidence without a hint of weakness, that is a mask it takes him a while to prepare.

Rhys holds his palm out above him, scowling. It's been four hours. Four hours of despair settling around him like mist.

This is why he didn't want to pull her so close earlier. Bonds are traitorous things. They're traps, and passing through them only makes them hold tighter. Now he doesn't even have to tug in order to feel Feyre sobbing in the back of his head the emotion is so strong and so recent.

Night magic always cuts both ways.

Rhys stands, drawing the shadows around him. He wouldn't have it any other way, of course. In his Court, the victor isn't the one who's the strongest most of the time, though being strong certainly helps. It's the one who can last through the most pain, whether it's survive the most cheats or weather the most suffering. It's about endurance.

And he has that in spades.

When he steps through his shadows into Feyre's cell, guards again dismissed, he amplifies the darkness and wraps it around them like a cloak. He can feel her terror, and as much as it's delicious to watch struggle to hate him even as she hates herself, it isn't why he came. "You've just beaten her second task. Tears are unnecessary."

Apparently Feyre doesn't think so, because she still covers her face with her hands. A glut of claustrophobia prickles in around him, and Rhys sighs, summons the darkness closer, and takes hold of her wrists.

Feyre fights him, weak with exhaustion and sorrow, but when she gives up, her eyes widen and he smiles when she sees he's turned the entire cell to shadow.

This is the part of darkness that makes him feel at home, full of everything and nothing. When he flies in night skies like this where it's impossible to see the horizon or boundaries it's like he's soaring past infinities, countless stars, sparkling courts and hidden monsters he can barely imagine before they wink past. It's infinite potential. In every creation myth he's ever studied, darkness was there at the start and will be there at the end, waiting for the next universe to be born.

Darkness is the one thing you can make anything from at all.

He leans forward and feels the spike of Feyre's pulse even as his own, calmer emotions seep through their bond and into her. He should not be sharing something so dangerously precious, but perhaps that's why he will win this game, because he's more willing than Amarantha to step into the heart of pain and risk annihilation for what he wants.

Perhaps that is why he keeps coming back to Feyre.

Either she's too weak to struggle or she's wondering too much at his shadows and skies because his lips graze her cheek. He licks up one tear, then another, savoring each of her gasps.

 _This is how you rebuild yourself_ , he says. _You create everything from darkness and build and build until you're whole again._

Underneath his hands, her arms tighten and an image flashes before him of Feyre in the snow, too cold, pulling back a well-worn bowstring as brown, frost-dappled deer rush through around them in the woods. He is too close, swimming through bright flashes of her memory like she has a gravity that pulls him in.

He should leave, sever this connection between them, not watch stars collapse in the back of his head as a thin line of fire licks up under his bones and their bond pulls him closer, his lips achingly near to hers. He should not be watching deer disappear into forests with her, should not feel it so closely when her she lets all the does escape into the trees and sinks to her knees, too tired to kill.

But her skin is a siren song, he's so close to her mouth that everything radiates heat and he should not be doing so many things. Exhaling, Rhys licks away a teardrop at the edge of her mouth.

This was only supposed to be a distraction, to jar her enough to overcome the next obstacle, but instead it's him tucking a strand of hair around his finger, savoring every taste of saltwater like it's its own wine. You know a person best when you see them at their most broken, and Feyre he suddenly wants to know better than anyone.

His tongue licks along her eyelashes and the spell is broken.

"That was disgusting." Feyre's face is flushed and angry, but her heart is pounding and she's looking at him like she can see right through him.

"I could have sworn I detected something that felt differently." Rhys bows, holding up his palm, and exits, swallowing the hitch in his throat. "Cauldron help us both when I teach you how to read."

-o-

The night everything changes is the night before the last task, the night he has a green faerie girl in his lap and laughs at her joke like it's supposed to be funny as Feyre sneaks out of the room.

Feyre can't feel the threads of anxiety and notes of hope stringing themselves through the air like he can and it's a pity. Tonight tensions are so thick he could get drunk on them. Rhys makes a joke back to the girl and she doesn't even have to pretend it's funny.

But when he sees Tamlin stand and move out into the hall, the same hallway that Feyre went to, there's a different kind of tension. One that sours everything.

Rhys cajoles the green faerie off his lap and strides, purposeful but nonchalant, over the floor. His bond with Feyre radiates shock, relief, hunger, and it is everything he can do after he passes through the doors to keep himself cold and mocking, as removed as a glacier, until Tamlin at least releases Feyre and goes back into the ballroom.

After that, it's all too much: her decorative paint smudged and her hair tousled up- something inside of him shakes loose and he feels his wings scraping at his back before he gives them permission to.

"Do you even begin to understand the game you are playing?" Rhys hisses, hands clawing into shadowy talons and pushing her onto the wall behind her. He's madder than he's been in ages. "If she finds you together she will kill you, Feyre, regardless of how many tasks or riddles you have left. Or do you actually intend to put yourself at my mercy?"

Eddies preserve him, he half-wishes she would.

"Never." She laughs, and it sounds like glass breaking, wild-eyed and hysteric. "I am going to die here. I don't care what she does. Or what you do, you pig. I don't."

There are dark shadows cutting across her face, not ones that he can control. Rhys leans closer. "Yes, you do. Otherwise you wouldn't fight half so hard."

He knows this about her because he knows it about himself.

Feyre juts out her chin, the dim candlelight sparking her too-bright eyes. "Without him, I have nothing. I already know I won't make it out alive. Why should I keep fighting? It'd be much easier to slip up and end it in his arms." She takes a shaky breath. "At least then I'd see him one last time."

 _Him, curled into himself, realizing she'd used an ash blade on him the first time. Horror and blood, broken bones and tendons that wouldn't put themselves back together, how cold the floor felt, how red his blood had looked between its stones, how often he had sworn to himself that the number of times she could do this to him was finite._

"Don't you dare." Rhys' hands grip Feyre's shoulders harder and he pins her.

Her eyes gain a hunter's clarity, dark and fixed. "What do you care?"

"What do I care?" His breath is uneven, heart snapping between extremes. He is so close to her that he can feel the flush of her skin, the dance of her pulse.

In the Night Court, one reveals nothing. The point at which you break is your greatest weakness, and if you're smart it's known to you and you only. You never enter a battle without a trump card. And you never get careless. But this mortal, this girl on whom all of their fates hang, has reduced him to a knuckle-cracking, staccato heartbeat, breaths he can't control and wings that scoop out space into the air behind him before he wills them away. "What I do care?" Rhys repeats, getting close and going dangerously still.

There's a clatter at the door, and Rhys snaps his head between it and Feyre, calculating costs and strategies.

She wants to know how much he cares and how much far he would be willing to go? Fine.

Rhys kisses her just as the door opens.

It is not gentle. Their kiss is fire and brimstone, deals and devils. It's his tongue sweeping through her mouth like hellfire, his teeth biting her lip like she's the end of his world and he wants it to burn more than anything. He wraps his arms around her even as he hates all of it, that this is how this kiss has to be: a show, a mask, a sudden scene in a glitzy corner, meaningless.

Feyre's too shocked at first to do anything, shocked maybe that he did it, that he broke his promise to her that he wouldn't touch her unless she wanted him to. But she recovers quick, and for all her struggles Rhys makes sure she ends up close enough to him so the paint smears.

It's all art and artifice, all practiced affection without abandon. It is exactly what he is to Amarantha and he despises it.

At least, that's what he tells himself when he takes his bow for the Queen, Tamlin, and their gathered crowd and Feyre splutters beside him.

And that's how Rhys sends Feyre back off to her cell, all art and artifice, games of make-believe, praying that she hasn't recognized or remembered that rush of heat, shame, and fury as he'd hated that he and Feyre were one more thing he had to ruin and then ruined it anyway.

* * *

 **Author's Note:** Thanks for reading and for all the feedback and love! You guys rock. :) I'm thinking we have maybe two chapters or so before we're done with the ACOTAR arc and move onto my own stuff (aka, it is about to go down). I have a question: do you guys prefer shorter chapters or longer ones (like this one)? I'm still blocking stuff out for chapter five, so let me know what you think!

Special extra cool fact: the song I've been listening to lately to write this is "Me and the Devil" by Soap&Skin.


	5. the whore and the harlot

**Author's Note:** Hey guys! Sorry for the wait on this one. Work's been busy and also I've been writing the scenes for this chapter and the next one trying to figure out what to include where. So that's why this update's taken a while. Bright side: chapter six should be up much faster as it's effectively already written! woo! Hopefully this doesn't feel too much like a stop-gap chapter, but if it does, know that the good stuff is on the way.

A lot of people are saying they prefer longer updates, which is great since my style works pretty well with that. Look forward to longer stuff! (I'll try not to make it overwhelmingly huge.) Thanks again for all the feedback! You guys keep me motivated. And now, back to our (anti)heroes. -cy.

* * *

When Feyre leaves the party, all the glitter and gauze goes out with her.

Amarantha allows the affair to continue for another half hour until she announces that while they are welcome to continue the festivities of the evening (no one will), she is going to get some rest and finish preparing for tomorrow. There is uneasy laughter. A few High Fae casually exchange bets on how long the Queen Under the Mountain will let Feyre live through the third challenge before killing her.

They are not very charitable, Rhys sniffs as Amarantha steps down from her dais. It doesn't matter, it'll just make taking the odds against them better.

Amarantha lays a hand on his arm. "I'd like to pass the night with you, High Lord."

A group nearby snickers and Rhys' smile is in place like water over jagged rocks. He'd hoped, of course, that she'd be too busy for him this last night, that there would be a final scheme that would require her attention more than him, but no. He shouldn't have expected his luck to hold out.

"Who wouldn't?" He murmurs into her ear, and waves sneeringly at all the lords and ladies who will mock him once they're certain he's out of earshot. When the same thing happens enough times, you're a fool if you don't notice a pattern.

When they get to the room he's been sharing with her for years, her smile is impossible to conceal.

That is when he suspects something is not going to go well for him.

He is certain of it when she binds his hands. The same thing has happened enough times, and oh, he is a fool.

It's all about control- that much he's learned. Weakened though he may be, he could still break through the ropes around his wrists. That, at least, he knows is still possible for him, even if so many things aren't. Like holding Amarantha's mind, which he once tried to do and failed at, realizing just how cut off from the majority of his powers he was.

"I thought tonight we'd try something a little different than normal, in honor of tomorrow's event." Amarantha strokes one finger down the curve of his spine, and despite himself Rhys curves toward her touch. It's all involuntary reflex sometimes and his body betrays him again, night after night. Except when it's not, when he has to fake it and he fakes it so well he has to wonder who has really become the monster in their story. "Rhysand, your wings."

He freezes, only for a moment, long enough to perhaps be unsure that he heard correctly, not long enough to question it. He summons them for her, cavalierly. "My Lady, you are as aware as I am that those are boring to play with."

"Oh, of course." Amarantha purrs, her fingertips moving over the leathery membrane between his wing joints down to the tips. Part of him wants to sigh; he hasn't had anyone touch his wings in so long, has tried to make sure they still hidden, that the slightest sensation drives him wild.

He almost doesn't expect the knife.

"You're right. You do hardly ever use these." She pulls the blade down through the wing membrane and Rhys suppresses a shudder: it's the old game again, metal or ash? Amarantha tears a hole through the other wing. "Maybe we should just take them off."

This time he cannot suppress a shudder when the blood from the holes in his wings slicks down his back. "I'd hardly be any fun after that."

He's seen the faeries she's left after she's taken their wings, sometimes after she's had him cut their wings off for her. The wings are nailed sometimes to the throne room wall like trophies, like Clare Beddor; other times, if they're too ruined, she leaves them for wild animals or burns them to cinders. The faeries never last long after that, just enough to reach despair.

He doesn't imagine he will be able to best them in that, either.

"It's not like you need them." Amarantha kisses him, long and almost luxurious, and part of him wants to escape into this, forget the pain in his back and the dread of the future, of wondering if Feyre can pull this off or if he has just doomed all of them to this terrible eternity, and pretend that Amarantha is not Amarantha, that her lips are someone else's.

He wants to tell her all the terrible things built up in the back of his head, all the swears and treachery even though that would end everything too soon- it's still this madman's urge, to say that the only reason their time together has any passion at all is because of his hatred for her whenever he has to touch her. But instead he brushes this barb off, scoops her loose hair out of her face in a chignon. "You're not bored of me yet."

"You're right." She breathes into his lips. When she pulls back, he knows that there will be pain again.

What he does not expect is for her to stab him in the heart with the ash dagger.

It hits the hard stone object in his chest and makes his breath stutter and jump and everything is panic. Blood runs down his back and out of his chest, so much blood and more pain than he's felt since he first got cursed like this. He's only dimly enough present to know that she takes the dagger out, though he can't figure out if that makes it worse or better. His skin bleats out his pulse and Rhys wraps his arms around himself, like holding himself together is the last thing he can do.

Amarantha is seated before him like a lecture student, intent, cataloguing each reaction. "Well, my High Lord of the Night, you've again lived up to my expectations."

He grits his teeth together in a thin line, trying not to give her any more satisfaction by watching his pain. But shivers rake up and down his chest and black spots crawl all over his vision. This can't be the end. She wouldn't let him go this easily.

Rhys pulls himself up through layers of consciousness, panting, bloody, but whole. When he has the presence of mind to notice that his wings have started to heal, he puts them away, out of sight, fast.

He will not have her look at them any longer than necessary, and that in the end is what gives him away.

For a moment he'd though she'd left, gone somewhere else with another more interesting playmate as he bled stains into her fine rugs and gilt-edged furniture. Sometimes she does that, leaves him to bleed out on her floor, crawl his way up through pain by himself as she takes another faerie into her bed. Sometimes she has him watch. Truthfully, he's not even surprised anymore; part of him expects it.

But no, tonight is theirs alone, and he hears the sound of her applause before his bleary eyes find her, tucked under the blankets and wearing only triumphant smile.

"Are you finished trying not to die yet?" She pats the covers next to her. "Come here already, dear Rhysand, it's so cold."

He fights his body not to shake. There are some times with her when the sex is worse than the foreplay, times when he's never sure if she has an even worse surprise waiting for him, or if she wants him just out of control enough to hurt him. He stands and climbs into bed with her, obedient as ever, the one thing that can do in this messed up palace.

"I stab you in the heart and you're alive. That's so good to know." She presses close to him and he smells rotting flowers and the warm scent of candles burning themselves to wax and ash. "I'll have to kill you in other ways when I get Tamlin."

She rakes a hand up his spine, his bare back, and down his legs, and he hates how she can come so close to destroying him without his permission and still get this close.

Rhys tuts, an old mask of his sliding back into place. "You might find that you tire of him first, you know. After all these years, don't think I haven't noticed that I'm still incredibly entertaining."

She stills under his touch, then curls around him so that her body is flush with his and her mouth cups his ear. "Maybe taking your wings tomorrow will be all the motivation he needs to see."

That time he cannot keep the shudder down as she kisses him, tongue down his mouth.

-o-

When they finish and he's alone again in his unused room, bile creeps up the back of his throat.

He keeps folding his wings out and then vanishing them, sure that he felt a rip, a leftover tear from Amarantha's ministrations earlier. Maybe an ash splinter infecting him and dooming him anyway. But no, each time there's nothing and he has to tell himself over and over that it's fine, it's fine.

 _her hand shoving that knife through his chest_

"Cauldron," he hisses, not sure where the oath is going when it leaves his mouth. This is getting ridiculous. No doubt there are servants from Amarantha at his door, reporting back on all the sounds they hear. Of course. She may have dismissed him for the night, but she's only too eager to fully document how he breaks.

To her, he has always been a study in strength and weakness, because when someone is strong it becomes only that much more exciting to find out where they aren't.

 _I have always wanted to destroy a Night Lord._

Enough.

Rhys lies loudly on the bed, and then lets the shadows carry him away, through the cracks in the flagstones of the floor, through the walls, and into the prison cells. He must be in rare and monstrous form, because the guards are already gone.

"That woman is running me ragged." He says and sinks down against a damp wall thick with mildew. It's dirty as a rat's nest down in here, and he doesn't care. The floor is where she is, stretching, her keen eyes glinting at him through the darkness. "I don't know how much more of this I can take."

Those eyes stay on him, ever assessing. Let her. He's finally found the one other person like him in this situation, the other person with the power to change everything despite being treated like they have nothing. Power is deceptive like that; sometimes people try to take it from you by making you believe you don't have any. Feyre pulls her leg toward her in another stretch, leg muscles tightening. "Why are you here?"

It wasn't like he had been expecting more of a reception. He tilts his head toward her. "Because you're the only one I can talk to who's not about to sell me out."

She sits against the cool wall with him and exhales. She doesn't say anything, just waits.

"I probably don't need to impress upon you how badly you need to win tomorrow." Rhys says. "But in case you're in need of a little motivation, I'd recommend it if you'd prefer for most of the people you've been talking to during your tenure here to remain alive."

She shifts, like she's hearing him for the first time. "You actually worry for your life? I thought you had a nice, secure position."

The way her lips move over the word "position" is like she's mocking him, too. Like she hates him just like the rest of them.

"Feyre," he sighs, leaning back and waving a hand carelessly, "why do you think I'm doing all this?"

He is so, so tired.

"Because you're a monster." She answers, simply.

Rhys has to laugh. "True, but also a pragmatist. The curse on us prevents me from shattering Amarantha's mind-surely you thought I would have done that already?"

For that he would have had to be in her head and see how perilously close her thoughts are to his. Perhaps it is a mercy that he will not be the one to kill her, will not have to look into that mirror and see what's reflected there.

Perhaps it's because he already knows the answer.

Feyre, though, is quiet.

He snorts. "Surely you didn't think I was in love with her."

The girl next to him shifts in a way he can almost swear is uncomfortable, and then moves into her next set of exercises, lunges across the dungeon floor. "Faeries don't love the same way humans do."

"Says the mortal girl in love with one."

"It's different." She stiffens. "Being immortal means that you have time to linger in the good parts, or that you can get over heartbreak by waiting it out. It means you take more chances because you have time enough to explore."

His expression must be something discourteous, because Feyre has to amend: "Tamlin wouldn't sleep with Amarantha. I know that."

"Oh, he'll splatter her once the curse is over, mark my words." Rhys feels a smile twist his mouth. "That's the best weapon we've got. Working Tamlin into a senseless fury against Amarantha will assure he'll tap his power to dispose of her. At least, that's the master plan we've been working toward. You should have been born with my abilities to feel his rage when he saw my tattoo on your arm."

It's a pleasant memory, being in power, having control when everything else around him seemed to spin in other directions.

Feyre is clearly not amused with how smart he is, though. "Who's to say he won't dispose of you as well?"

"He might try to." Rhys shrugs, like the High Lord whose special ability is brute strength coming after him is nothing. "But I'd wager he takes out Amarantha first, and I've been known to make profitable bets. Besides, I still have a few other cards to play."

He'll have his own powers back by then, a formidable opponent in his own right. There's a reason why he's High Lord of the most terrifying Court there is: he is even more a nightmare than his subjects. Feyre asks him about his familial enmity with Tamlin and he gives her a cursory glimpse at their torrid mutual history, fathers slaying fathers, Amarantha avenging her friend and dooming all their Courts.

And now it's all come to this.

"What a mess," Rhys says honestly. You never know how much you miss being honest until you have to lie all the time. "Here we are, with the fate of our world in the hands of an illiterate human."

Feyre's eyes narrow, and he's sure she's trying to twist this to her advantage: how to double-cross the double-crosser. But then he feels her tamp down on her hatred for whatever reason. He cocks his head. Perhaps she really has figured him out.

"I've already said too much." Rhys stands, stretching, and relieved to feel his wings, invisible but present, tucked away in another corner of his head, healed. He can't resist a parting shot. "If you were truly clever, you'd figure out a way to use this against me."

Except that there's a not small part of him that wonders, on seeing her face half-hidden by the darkness, almost smiling, that she already has.


	6. the third task

**Author's Note:** And here it is, the last chapter following ACOTAR! Finally, an answer to that burning question: why did Rhys freak out before he left the Mountain? Let me know what you think!

Thanks again for the lovely reviews, you guys made me feel really great when I was bummed out last week. Next time will be a walk on the wild side with Rhys' Court and a little of Feyre's first visit. Get psyched and enjoy the longer chapter! -cy.

* * *

When Feyre is presented with three faeries in sacks over their heads and daggers before them, Rhys keeps thinking of how they left it last night, how he dissolved back into darkness and she looked at him once last time and told him he could have asked her for anything. And it's true: she needed her arm healed too badly to really fight him, both of them knew it.

What he'd liked was the way she'd calculated out what she could handle and what she would be unwilling to give up, and made him a counteroffer. A week, not two. He hadn't been expecting that, someone else who'd back up their promises with some fight.

But when Feyre shucks the last sack off the third prisoner's head and hesitates, it's everything Rhys can do to keep himself together.

This is the part about losing that he can't take: how convinced everyone around becomes that they're done, washed up, the faeries next to him resigning themselves to another half-century or more under Amarantha's rule. So it's a last-ditch gambit. So the person you have to kill is the person you love.

If this were him, Tamlin would already be on the floor. Rhys brushes a bit of lint off his robes. In the Night Court, you get used to making sacrifices, of always cataloguing how much a thing or person is worth against other things and people. You don't do it to be cruel; you plan it in advance so that when you have to make decisions like this, you can make them quick and without causing more suffering than you need to.

But Feyre isn't him, and he can feel it from the waves of anguish radiating off of her, sour and sharp. Last night, before he'd left, she'd asked him about Amarantha. "How can you kill someone you've been so close to? Maybe you don't like them, but doesn't it mean anything to you to have known what they're really like?"

"How can you still want a monster around once you what it truly is?" He'd smiled by way of response. "It doesn't matter. Tamlin will take care of it anyway."

The ash dagger in her hands catches the light as Feyre twists it over for a better grip, and Rhys hopes that she understands all the things that he was trying to tell her about the curse. His hand passes over his own heart as Feyre drives the blade home.

Against his better judgement, Rhys winces. He can still remember the jolt of the dagger as it struck him, and now thanks to Feyre's inability to shield her disgust and horror, he knows exactly how the blade slips in her hand, her surprise and inability to hold onto it as Tamlin struggles to squeeze his chest wound together.

There's a difference between being fated to do something and choosing to do it, and the difference is that the second path is harder. Fate will always get you where you need to go; making your own destiny is so much harder and so much more fragile.

And she's won. Some brave faeries even call out for her to be freed, but Amarantha just holds up a hand.

The Queen Under the Mountain stands, smiling, congratulates Feyre on completing her third task, and announces that she has no intention of freeing anyone. The room quiets as realization sets in. Feyre objects, of course. Because she's a mortal, she forgot the cardinal rule of dealing with faeries is always to be specific in each and every contract. Feyre obtained the immediate release in one deal, not the other.

A careless mistake.

He should be planning other escape routes, shifting the surface of his face to mock-disdain, distancing himself from her in the name of self-preservation. Feyre doesn't know the riddle, she's messed up the contract with Amarantha on the one set of tasks she could complete, and it's clear she's not going to win. The safer thing, the smarter thing, would be to make a new plan for the long-term.

It would be stupid to put all his chips on her, and he's good enough to gambling to know when his luck's run out. It should be a shrug, too bad, and moving on.

Except it isn't.

And when Amarantha attacks her, something in Rhys slips.

He can hold out for one, two, three, a handful of bones breaking and lightning curling around Feyre's limbs. Her injuries ghost through their bond, and he can tell the moment it shifts from Amarantha playing with her to Amarantha making a concerted effort to kill. "Feyre!"

He says her name much louder than he thought he would, but it doesn't make Amarantha stop. It doesn't even make Feyre look up, and in that it confirms all his worst fears for the situation. This is going to keep going until Feyre is dead, and she's well on her way there already.

Somewhere in the melee Feyre must slip in and out of consciousness, because Amarantha has to stop to bring her back to cogency a few times. Rhys keeps waiting for Amarantha to realize that he's yelling, to see that he's doing something he's not supposed to as her whore, her closest consort. Or maybe it really is true, and she's already replaced him with Tamlin.

Maybe he really has become useless. Rhys' fingernails dig into his palms. No. He won't let that be all he is.

"Your mortal heart is nothing to us." Amarantha holds Feyre up by her bloody, dirty hair, her tunic stained red-brown from her injuries and her hands trying to shield her broken ribs from another assault. "Nothing, do you understand?"

It's in that moment, when Feyre's eyes slip over to glazed that Rhys feels she does. Even if he didn't have the bond, couldn't read her feelings as easily as his own, if he were just any other member in this audience he would be able to tell that this is the first time Feyre lets herself believe those words. All through these months, she's been driving ahead on her love for Tamlin alone, her dedication and belief that she deserves happiness as much as the other people in this messed up Court do.

This is when it falters, that drive and that indefatigable spirit that not even dances, drinks, and death could snuff out.

And he won't have that.

Maybe he grabs the ash dagger because Feyre's situation is too close a mirror to his own. Maybe he runs toward Amarantha with it in hand, all of his power that he can muster in this sad, cursed state simmering beneath the surface of his skin, because he doesn't want to share her fate, defeated and broken before a crowd. Maybe he's publicly outing himself as a traitor because then at least his death would be of his own making, and not Amarantha's idea of entertainment.

All those reasons are close, but not the whole truth.

The reason he crashes into the white barrier that Amarantha erects with a wave of a hand, flies back, and then picks himself up again, dagger still clenched in his fist, is because he does not want to lose Feyre.

It's a small but subtle difference between not wanting her to lose and losing her, and in this moment, his hands in talons, flying through the throne room, he knows it perfectly.

"I should have known that you would turn out to be a traitorous piece of filth." Amrantha is only half-amused, mostly pissed off that he's taking time away from her torturing the mortal girl. "I didn't intend on this until later, but I'm going to enjoy killing you, Night Lord."

One by one his claws push back into his hands, tearing the skin over his knuckles open. Blood runs down his hands and down his arms and Rhys swears.

"You are just as bad as that human garbage." Amarantha pushes a lock of his hair back. Gentle, then brutal. That's how she operates, always keeps you from knowing which hand is going to hit you next. But he's ready. Maybe if he gives Feyre enough time to think, Tamlin enough time to recover, maybe someone else will come up with a plan to get them all out of this.

She backhands him with her magic and his head cracks the marble on the way down. Somehow he lost the knife, but it doesn't matter because it's all he can do to keep it together as the marble around him spiderwebs into fissures and his blood pools into the cracks and edges when her magic hits him and hits him. He tries pushing back and holding her mind, but even there she squeezes him out and the pressure makes something in his nose burst.

Only magic, he grits his teeth together. She's not even going to dirty her hands to kill him, that's how low he's become.

He has to get up. His arms aren't broken yet and he has to keep going. As many times as he gets up, he'll draw her attention and keep it away from Feyre. It took him a while to wake up from when Amarantha stabbed him with the dagger, whatever- however long it took he'll have to last through it so that Tamlin can recover. At least with another High Lord around then Feyre stands a chance.

Rhys probably looks like something out of a nightmare, wiping blood out of his eyes so he can see. He probably looks like death, and that's exactly what he wants her to see when she looks at him, something no one else would want to touch, bruised and cut-up.

"You deserve to be destroyed." Amarantha's lip curls.

And in this moment he feels like the most powerful person in the room, tipping over a ledge into nothingness and waiting for gravity to catch him. "Then do it."

Cauldron whorls above and below, he breathes out shakily, pushing his arms underneath him, he can't stand being this weak. His arms buckle and slip in the blood under his palms, and he slams back into the red marble again.

"Stop." Someone says, her voice threaded with pain. "Please."

Blood gushes down his nose as he lifts himself off the floor again, his mouth sticky and full of the tang of iron. Rhys shoots Feyre a look, and at once their bond pulls taut, closer than it's ever been. And he's in one place but two places, seeing her face streaked with tears, dirt, and bloody, one leg bent at an excruciating angle, and then seeing the red triangle gush of blood from his nose down his chin, his violent, violet eyes, the tatters of his tunic, and the cuts along his arms.

"Don't even pretend you care about what happens to him, you liar." Amarantha addresses Feyre and Rhys snaps back to his own head in time to see Feyre's spine bend unnaturally as Amarantha crooks a finger.

He yells her name, but doesn't think she can hear him even when he yells it again and again.

And then there's one clean, clear image that flashes through his mind, a rabbit racing through the winter woods, panicky, like it knows it's being chased until an arrow at last pierces it. Then a younger Feyre, holding the small shape in her lap and crying, even when the rabbit's death stains a fist-sized mark onto her last good shirt. _I'm sorry, I'm so sorry._

Tamlin crawls over to Amarantha, but the plan fails, she doesn't relent and a line of red trickles down the side of Feyre's mouth as she tilts her head up before Amarantha strikes the killing blow.

"The answer," Feyre coughs, choking on her own blood, "is love."

And then Amarantha snaps her spine.

-o-

The thing about losing is that sometimes you can still win if you buy yourself enough time. And the thing about bonds is that they tend to have clearly defined beginnings and endings. _You will be bound to me until your death, where one week of your life each month is mine._

The pain is too much for Rhys to parse anything beyond the distressed signals of his body through for a while, but it slips away in layers, like water sliding down a drain. His magic is back. And not only that but back in full. All along his body, his skin repairs itself, bones knit back together, and he can feel the ripple of horror, disbelief, joy, and grief sliding over the throne room. His heart beats like it used to, no longer a stone.

And he can feel someone else riding along in his head.

"So much for your grand shows and bravado, mortal." Amarantha lets Feyre's body fall to the floor in a heap. "You could have ended it that much sooner by admitting the truth."

This time when Rhys gets up from the floor and all eyes are on him, his tattered cloak and tunic, it's as the victor. "She solved it."

It's not so much to remind Amarantha what happened, but more the audience. Specifically, to remind one person that the riddle is broken and that his rage and grief should enable him to use his newly regained powers to the fullest. And Tamlin does. There used to be a few stories about him in his beast form, though there aren't that many people who could say that they'd ever witnessed the Spring Lord loosing his grip on his power before.

Perhaps now there will be even more stories.

He watches Amarantha until Tamlin rips her throat out. Part of Rhys is sorry that he's making Feyre see this, but not much. So much of him needs to see her die, know it happened and that she isn't ever coming back. He imagines it might be the same for Feyre, too.

But what she does not need to see is the brutality, the ravaging that follows the Queen Under the Mountain's death. For that, Rhys turns away and walks back to Feyre's body. He realizes belatedly that perhaps showing her her own dead form is also not very comforting, but with the fighting along the edges of the crowd it's the only peaceful thing there is to see in this room.

When it's over, Tamlin cradles her to his chest and asks all the High Lords for their help. Autumn, Summer, Winter, Dawn, and Day come forward and then Rhys does, too. He feels Feyre's presence waver at the edges of his mind- how odd to keep sharing slices of himself with her, the feel of his matted tunic against his arms, the way the air tastes so stale down here, the rush of his dizziness wearing off.

The bond carries his soft laughter to her as he forms the tiny crystal in his hand and smiles at no one that anyone else in the room can see. From Feyre, there's only wonder.

 _I had a feeling I'd see you again_ , his gambler's mind tells her before she leaves and Rhys lets the jeweled seed fall.

-o-

And that's the thing about happy endings: he doesn't need to be there for them. Tamlin and Feyre are reunited and everyone's content.

Mostly everyone. While the Seven High Lords may have agreed to make a mortal into a High Fae, it's not like their decision was received well by every member of the Courts. There are quite a few Rhys already sensed harboring ill will toward her: after all, how was it that she got to kill two (three if you counted Andras) of their own and be brought back to life when their relatives and friends were dead? Why reward a fae-killer with immortality?

Rhys could have stayed in that throne room, reading and cataloguing emotions for hours, so mixed was the spectrum of feelings and so relaxing it was to have his full strength back. But there was no time. There would be other faeries, those who had perhaps been more loyal to Amarantha or those who doubted his show of allegiance at the end, and they would look for a fight.

So Rhys rounds up his finances, collects on as many of the bets he'd made before the third task as possible, and sends the first wave of his retainers back to the Night Court and its territories ahead of him. The treasury he sends with some trusted servants (though, really, the phrase "trusted servant" in the Night Court is mostly an oxymoron- these are servants that he can rely on to get the money to the Court and know that he will come after them if they betray him in any way).

That's what being in his Court means: you are the biggest, the baddest, the most fearsome and the worst of all fae, and even though people are terrified of you it's not going to stop them from coming for you when the odds are in their favor. It's his job to get his people out before the celebrations Under the Mountain turn to testing their luck against other local monsters.

Mostly the need for escape is why he keeps busy. There's a lot to coordinate, and some of his subjects aren't sure which way to fly after forty-nine years so they require guidance.

The other reason is because something is wrong with the bond.

It was always one that was encroaching on him, closer than he wanted it to be when Feyre was a human. But now that she's been transformed into a High Fae, it's like something's shifted. He has his magic back and the bond should be under his control. It was of his making, after all.

But he didn't make it so that when Tamlin and Feyre end up alone together, he can feel every shudder and every gasp of skin on skin. It wasn't supposed to keep him that close to her head. Rhys constructs walls and mutes it as he coordinates flight paths, and even then he can still tell when Feyre lies back in her bed, content and exhausted. He takes a breath, weakens the walls, and gives the connection between them a gentle tug as the last of his Court members vanishes into shadow.

It takes her a few moments but she finds him, unfailingly, like he knew she would.

"Whoa." Feyre says, squinting at the late afternoon sun.

Rhys unfurls his wings, whole and wide and unbroken, and laughs. "I forget how long it's been since you've seen the sun."

"Too long." She shakes her head after staring at the sky for a while and notices his wings. "I thought I felt something calling me here. Want do you want?"

She hasn't changed that much: still the same mouth, same eyes, the features a little sharper now that she's become High Fae, and a slight point added to her ears. Still the same blunt speech.

There's always been this kernel of ruthlessness in her that he's admired, an understanding that sometimes you have to give everything to do anything worthwhile. That hasn't changed.

"Just to say goodbye before your beloved whisks you off forever." He jokes. Part of him expects her to blush, to acknowledge that something about this is off.

But Feyre just laughs like nothing is different. "Hardly forever. You still get a week every month." Her eyes go from cordial to serious. "Why'd you do that?"

He knows what she's talking about without her having to mention it. "I want to be remembered as someone who fought against her. Not the one who stood in the shadows and did nothing, that's all. A thing you'll learn about being immortal is how hard it is to leave any kind of legacy. I'd like to be part of a legend, to have been useful."

She nods, slowly, like she's buying it but not quite. He inhales, and meets her eyes. "And because I didn't want you to die alone."

Something in her face shifts, and he looks away. At least they're not swapping consciousnesses like they were before, so maybe he has some control of this bond after all. It's odd that it outlasted death, but perhaps his powers came back at precisely the right moment to preserve it.

"Thank you." She says.

He waves it off, wings shrugging behind him. "I doubt you'll be thanking me when I take you to the Night Court. Well, I suppose I'll see you in a month."

Rhys bows, mid-waist, and dismisses his wings. The shadows are just starting to creep around him for a rather showy exit, his usual favorite, when a thought occurs to him and he goes rigid, locks his eyes on Feyre's again, and sniffs the air for magic.

A bond that can outlast death. There is only one of those he knows about.

Her eyes are wide and curious and he detects magic from all Seven Courts, unsurprising, but then there's a tipsiness, the heady feeling of falling over a precipice, open skies and rock towers and stars.

No.

Rhys stumbles back.

This cannot be possible. In no way should he be sensing magic like that, even if he was cut off from the bulk of his powers for years, he should have felt something like that earlier, shouldn't he? He'd have had to.

Unless his heart was made of stone, unless this too was some demented, warped part of their curse, haunting him with its aftereffects . In some dark corner of his mind, he can still feel Amarantha laughing at him. _Oh, my foolish High Lord of the Night._

Because there is only one bond strong enough to outlast death.

He vanishes in a blink, fast enough so she won't see his face when the choruses of denials end and one horrified revelation is all he has left:

Of all the faeries in Prythian, there was no way that Feyre could be his mate.


	7. courts and corridors

Once upon a time, there was a beauty and a beast.

The beauty fell in love with the beast and broke his curse, and that should have meant they'd live happily ever after. They were supposed to live in his manor, and she was supposed to visit her family and paint, and together they would live out the rest of their days in comfort and in happiness.

But instead the beauty died under a mountain in order to save a kingdom, and when she came back she found she'd been in a different story all along.

Once upon a time, there was a beauty and there were beasts.

And she was no longer sure which monster was hers, let alone if she'd ever stopped being a monster herself.

-o-

The corridors of the Night Court have always been dark and cavernous and when Rhys breathes in they have the scent of a room long unoccupied. The first week coming back home is always treacherous, relearning the nuances of his halls, remembering which alcoves in the carved rock are assailants' favorites and which of the long, arching paths lead to caves and which lead to cliffs.

But even more than that these days his own mind is a weapon, one that could hurt others as easily as hurt him, one that right now replays a certain scene over and over in his head: the way he'd felt all through the morning before he'd met her on the Mountain's precipice before flying off, knowing, _knowing_ what she was doing with Tamlin and how it made her feel. He remembers the prickle of jealousy he'd felt, the dim resignation, before it was poisoned by surprise, before he caught the scent that damned them all, a thread of starlight wrapping around the base of his heart and pulling him toward her like a planet orbiting a sun, even as he vanished.

Feyre is his mate.

Rhys' hands shimmer into talons and he pauses in the darkness, the slicing tang of anticipation on his tongue from the rogues waiting for him down the hall. Good. This is how he'd spent his first two weeks back home in the Night Court, cutting faeries who dared to stand against him into shreds, and this is how he blocked out the connection binding him to a not-so-mortal girl in a not-so-distant Court, with blood and broken bones and dominance.

Perhaps, he thinks as he flexes his claws, he ought to be thanking her.

After forty-nine years, there are many faeries in the Night Court willing to test their Lord, ones who imagine that they would make a better ruler than him, High Fae or not. He did not expect his absence to go unnoticed. And now, he's glad of it.

Let them come.

Because even though it takes him away from other important work, he needs the release. It was one thing to have Amarantha plaguing him; it's a whole other level of torture where even the inside of his head isn't safe.

When he cracks his knuckles, it echoes down the intricately carved walls, as though the sound itself is a tattoo beating into the rock of the Night Court, saying _mine, mine, mine_ with every reverberation.

There is not a lot that he can guarantee. A king on a dank green island gathers his forces, Rhys' own Court is in disarray- to say nothing of the state of the other Fae Courts scattered across the continent- and a bond that should not exist still courses emotions through his head like a door opened that he cannot close.

But there is one thing he can promise, and that is if you crossed him on a night like this, a night when the string tethering him to someone else pulled so tight he could hardly breathe, you would not survive.

A smile like a scythe curls around his lips and his wings flare out behind him in a clatter of bone and membrane. He is almost grateful for the constant battles, if only because they dull out and drown out everything else.

His blood beats in his ears, and even before the first opponent strikes, he's laughing.

Because in this moment, he can forget.

-o-

The long and short of it is that she is constantly adapting.

She'd adapted when the money ran out in her family's house, when she'd had to take up a bow bought with the last dregs of her father's coppers, when she'd taught herself to hunt and skin and dry meat so it would last. She'd adapted when she'd killed a wolf and been brought to the Spring Court, and when she'd gone Under the Mountain to save those she cared about.

And now, here she is again.

Adaptation isn't something she dislikes, because it means she'll learn something. And sure, she hadn't relished learning how to transform an animal from a corpse into tools, meat, and clothes, but she'd done it and she'd marveled at it after. She got better at killing so that she wouldn't damage the tips of her arrows, used birds' feathers for fledging, and patched cloaks and boots for her father, her sisters, and herself.

She had also had to learn not to throw up when she took the skin off a kill, let alone looked at a once-living thing and known what she'd done to it. It still bothered her, but she'd swallowed down the bile long enough to do the job. She'd learned not to raise her voice when Nesta's fingernail picked at the paint chipping off the dining room table or how, night after night, there was only one person in that house hiked back from the wilderness with food and supplies for them.

She'd learned how to survive under Amarantha.

And sometimes it's so hard to remember that it's okay now, that she doesn't have to jolt into consciousness in the middle of the night with her heart pounding because so many people depend on her, not just for food or companionship anymore, but for their lives.

But no, her infinitely adaptable mind keeps spinning her awake at all hours, asking why she isn't struggling, why she isn't learning, and after a while Feyre got tired of ignoring the questions.

The paintbrush dips unexpectedly in her hand and Feyre scowls at the canvas.

Since coming back to the Spring Court with Tamlin, since rebuilding the Spring Court with him, her life has swung between joy and frustration. Joy because she's free, and when she wakes up in the mornings she doesn't see a dungeon or a small hut, but a bed that is hers and comfortable. Joy because she can wander through the corridors of the Spring Court all day and see beautiful things and then paint them with the seemingly unending supply of paints and canvases that Tamlin lavishes upon her.

Not to mention Tamlin himself.

But there is also that keen edge of frustration: the nightmares that she has to talk herself into believing aren't real, relearning how to walk, how to hold a brush, getting used to all the colors and distances her High Fae eyes can see that her mortal mind isn't used to processing yet. Some things are easier than others: seeing more magic is less difficult to adjust to after Tamlin had shown her the Spring Court without its glamours before.

 _Back when she had been human_ , Feyre says to herself as she picks the brush back up.

There are also other things, how long it had taken Lucien to heal from their adventures Under the Mountain, how Tamlin told her not to worry about it, how still some of the Spring Court servants call her Fae Killer when they think she won't hear.

Not like she could avoid hearing much these days, with new High Fae ears that picked up all the noises she didn't want them too- sounds in the middle of the night that would have seemed comforting now sounded like preludes to attacks, rumors drift to her like a magnet, and even the breathing of deer in the forest drives her insane if she listens too long or too closely to it.

The brush snaps in half and Feyre recoils as paint splatters her tunic and her face. At once she shoots to her feet. It's like being a child in an adult's body- like being twelve all over again and banging into things, eternally clumsy and unsure how to move through space. Back then she'd hated it, and she hates it even more now.

She is a huntress, she tells herself, or at least she had been one at some point even if she is one no longer, and that means she ought to remember how to exist in this world without careening through it.

A memory comes unbidden to her: Rhys sweeping over the marble floors Under the Mountain, darkness trailing off him in tendrils, his movements all the subtlest of dances.

She almost upends the easel she'd been working on and has to scramble at the last second to catch it. Days earlier she'd knocked over a pot of paint and stained a rug. Tamlin had just laughed, told her he'd never liked that carpet anyway, and had a new one brought in but Feyre still felt horrible ruining something like that, a work of art in its own right.

So she'd moved here, to a room with a marble floor, telling him that she wanted to paint out of these windows for a while. Just in case.

Her hands ball into fists. Just in case she was still too coltish and wobbly on her legs to balance properly, just in case she lacked the simple skill to stand steady.

Just in case she floundered as she continued to take back the movements and the grace that had come so easily to her before.

Just in case she's right again, and she really isn't ready to do anything in this new body more than sit prettily as a court decoration.

Feyre schools her breathing. Anger makes her move faster, and she has a hard enough time moving normally these days. The first few weeks of being High Fae, she'd run into walls and tripped over herself mercilessly. Now at least she has some control, but it isn't perfect. She hadn't been born into this body, and it wasn't as though a few weeks would allow her to master it completely.

Sometimes it's hard to remember that.

Still, she thinks, checking both directions of the hallway, the moon coasting along outside and dappling the long gold and glass corridor with silver light, all it would take was practice. She has practiced before, and she could do it again. All it is is adaptation, and there isn't anyone around, at least not here. It's late enough that she could see how she's coming along.

Tensing her leg muscles, Feyre fixes a point at the other end of the hall, a dark wood end table with a vase full of lilacs and baby's breath.

Then she takes off.

Her new body is more lithe than her human form, and the amount of fine control that she has over her limbs still astounds her. She could feel the cool night air curve around her neck, every indent of the ornate mosaics of the floor as her feet pound over them. It's thousands more details than she'd used to, life changing into a blur of color and sound she never knew was there, and it scares her as much as it exhilarates her.

If she could paint this rush of color and flicker of stars, she'd never leave her easel.

Feyre speeds up, going faster than she'd been able to as a human. This is the part she loves, when she gets better, more in control-

But then her left leg slides out under her- she trips over her own damn foot- and she lands in a heap on the floor, tumbling over herself and rubbing the pain out of her head when she stops. Somewhere by that damned end table, someone laughs.

Glowering, Feyre uses the wall to get back to her feet. "I don't find this very amusing."

The light in Tamlin's eyes softens as he approaches, though he can't resist a smirk. "Perhaps you're already aware of this and are doing it on purpose, but your nightly rituals are terrifying my servants."

She wants to say _good_. She wants to say _let them be scared._ She wants to say _tell them to remember that when they call me Fae Killer behind my back or when they leave the chairs too far for me to reach without stumbling_.

But she knows better.

Tamlin probably meant that her running through halls, closing her eyes and attempting to walk blind was making the Spring Court faeries laugh at her, think she's crazier than usual. She hangs her head. The reason she practiced and stumbled and fell in these lonely hallways was because she did not want them (or especially Tamlin) to see her at her worst.

Still, her Spring Lord runs a finger along the edge of her jaw and laughs when it comes away smudged with cadmium yellow. "Did you get into another bout with your canvas?"

Feyre rolls her eyes, but cannot suppress a smile. "The other party looks worse for wear, I assure you."

"I'm pleased to hear it." Tamlin slings an arm around her shoulders and leads her back to her easel to help her clean up her paints, wash off her brushes, and later whisk her back to their chambers for the night. And she could almost get used to this, the routine, the slow reconstruction of muscles in her legs and fine motor control in her wrists. "It wouldn't be art if it were otherwise. You're developed a particularly avant-garde style these days."

She could almost see this lasting forever and she could almost want it to.

But that does not explain why, when she feels a tug low in her stomach in the middle of that night, the same gentle but insistent pulling that she felt a month ago before she left the Mountain, she's not surprised. It doesn't explain why, when she has to explain to Tamlin all the prices she paid for their freedom and when he storms out of the hall and through their grounds to shred some wandering enemy fae to ribbons, she feels relief.

-o-

Rhys lounges in his study, paging through the reports he'd had his steward prepare when she arrives.

During the third week after his return, things had settled down. His subjects do not challenge him in shadowy halls as often, though sometimes he can feel their eyes tracing his path across a room, they remain appropriately submissive. Part of him is pleased to have so quickly regained his standing, part of him misses the rush of always being battle ready, of never knowing when it would end or what it would take to come out on top.

They have moved onto the more dangerous part of their game, when all the hotblooded usurpers have been dealt with and now only the ones willing to wait for his moments of weakness remain.

Rhys lazily moves onto the next scroll, resources and holdings from the last decade. He'd been trained for this, of course, primed to take over the Night Court and able to defend it, and he knew how to do it well.

Their financial situation is stable, even if the treasury isn't massive. He'd taken as much as he could from Amarantha in gambling as he could, stolen as much else as his subjects could carry without attracting the attention of the other High Lords, and still their coffers are not what they had been. The Night Court would survive, of course- it always did, that was the beauty of it- but this was not quite the way he'd intended on coming back.

Not with this bond in his head and a war brewing on foreign shores.

He's thumbing back through some calculations when the attendants he'd sent for Feyre usher her in and she stumbles, quietly seething, into the room.

"Well met," Rhys says, looking up from his papers. "I hadn't expected you to arrive so soon."

"Oh?" Feyre says, an edge lacing through that single syllable as deadly as any hunter's arrow. "I thought that you'd be awaiting my arrival with bated breath, having sent for me in the dead middle of the night."

Rhys shrugs and folds the scroll back up. "For some of us, nighttime is perfectly normal to call on each other."

Actually, he'd known Feyre would be asleep. He'd just gotten tired of it.

He is tired of trying to balance accounts, trying to keep the faeries under his rule safe, trying to ignore the stream of emotions coming through the other half of his head like he isn't even ruler in this the most private and essential of his domains.

So, when the appointed hour had come, he'd sent for her. Immediately.

"Not all of us are Night Court fae." Feyre says, irritation and sleeplessness blossoming through his head. "You could have waited until the morning."

And gone through another night of her and Tamlin in vivid color and sound, pouring unchecked through the recesses of his mind? No, thank you. He had had enough of that.

Rhys rises from the desk, walks to the front, and leans back against it. "How strange. You had no problem the first three months with our arrangement."

He could almost feel her fingernails pressing into her palms as her fists tightened.

"I had no notion of time Under the Mountain." She grits, eyes narrowed. "This is different."

"Because you expected me to be noble enough to release you from your vow now that we're both free of Amarantha?" Rhys asks. He leans in and lifts a lock of her hair to his lips, an eyebrow raised. "I'm flattered you think I have any such qualms."

She shakes her head to tear the hair from his grip, and in doing so, she unbalances herself.

Rhys catches her in a moment, quick and careful, and helps her regain her footing, even as she curses under her breath.

"Still learning?" He breathes, his face close to hers.

Her eyes narrow, then widen. "That was you I felt. In my head, earlier tonight. When you summoned me as Tam and I..." She swallows. "Why were you so relieved?"

All things are suffering if you look at them closely enough. This what you learn in the Night Court, to find the weaknesses that people conceal from you so you can take advantage of them. Suffering means you want something badly enough to go through pain for it, and it's the only kind of currency he's ever known.

"Perhaps you are too tired from your journey to be much use to me at the moment." He says, releasing her. "I'll see you in the morning when you're rested."

There are some things that you can only buy with pain, with wanting them more than wanting comfort.

"Of use to you? What does that mean?" Feyre repeats, off balance for a moment without his arms supporting her but quickly recovering. "You never answered my question."

"If you're so curious, sleep and maybe you'll receive answers when you're more cogent to appreciate them." Rhys snaps his fingers and a pair of servants appear, little more than dark mist hovering on the threshold of the study. "Take our guest to her rooms."

Her eyes narrow at him as she walks away. "Don't try anything."

He can feel her plotting designs for snares and traps already and it's all he can do to bow without laughing. Like her traps could stop him, a creature of shadow and mist and stars. "I assure you, I have better prey than you to hunt tonight. Sleep well, Feyre darling."

His plans will wait until she's rested, and even though the bond passes all of Feyre's rage and indignation to him, at last he can get through these scrolls and mountains of paperwork, dispatch servants to move his court maneuverings into motion. Anger he can handle. It's the slow times of the night that their bond trips him up, when she and Tamlin are alone in hallways when he wants to rip them apart, vanish into darkness and yell at them to stop, that he's trying to work.

Or worse, those brief respites when his relief is so palpable that it seeps through their bond and even Feyre can feel it.

But that is later. Now, it's just the gentle burn of hatred before she settles into slumber.

He knows that she'll shiver before falling asleep even without the bond telling him she does.

* * *

 **Author's Note:**

Hey guys! First an apology: I'm so sorry for taking forever to write a new chapter and post. I had to deal with some rough stuff last year, including a friend's funeral, and that made getting stories done all sorts of impossible.

Anyway, the point is I'm back and I want to finish this before ACOMAF comes out. So, hold onto your hats and get ready for more FeyRhys! I'm still reading through my old notes (yes, I have this all planned out like a total weirdo) but I'm hoping to have chapters coming to you fairly regularly.

And just thanks. For sticking around, signing up for alerts, leaving me nice notes on this. It's meant a lot to have reviews coming in to my inbox even when I wasn't updating as frequently, and your kind words helped me through some dark times. This is me paying that kindness back.

Okay, enough sappiness. Time for Feyre's first week at the Night Court. :)

-cy.


	8. conquerors

Rhys drifts through the halls, trailing a finger over intricate carvings etched into the stone. Sometimes he wonders if Amarantha did it all deliberately, choosing to hole up in the Mountain, Prythian's most sacred peak, to defile it. Sometimes he wonders if she did it because she had a contingency plan, that she knew it would catch him up like this even if she should fail, that he will always be walking through his own mountainous Court and seeing her.

He smooths his shoulders from a hunch into something vaguely cavalier before knocking on Feyre's door. When there's no answer, he dissipates into shadow and melts through the wall.

Feyre sleeps like she's used to a smaller space. He noticed it before in her cell, and at first he'd thought it must have been defensive, that she wanted to minimize the amount of her open to attack. But no, she has a whole bed and she's sleeping on one side so close to the edge it's like she's about to fall off, her sleeping face frowning.

It's just enough to make him wonder what her life was like before Tamlin found her. And that's just enough to make it awkward for him to stand there, so he coughs, pointedly.

Feyre jolts awake and scrambles for the blanket. "How did you get in?"

"It's my Court."

"I meant," she says, wrapped in covers and inspecting the closed door as best she can from her limited vantage point, "how did you get in without triggering my snare?"

"Did that work on Tamlin?" Rhys tsks. "Both of us may be High Lords, but you'll have to up your game if you wish to trap me."

Feyre mutters something that sounds suspiciously disappointed.

"You're my guest. Did you think for a moment you weren't under my protection? There are things in this Court that wouldn't need to open the door to hurt you, much less be dissuaded by a little rope and trickery." Rhys kneels by the door and feels along the snare. It's well constructed. "Were these previously the curtains?"

Feyre crosses her arms. "You could've told me it'd be useless and I would have left them alone."

"Oh no. I'm much too amused by your doubting my hospitality to do anything like that." Rhys lets the ragged curtain snare fall back into place. "Get ready. I'll send some servants to assist you with dressing, and I can even order them to remain corporeal if you'd like the pleasure of catching something."

"That," Feyre says, attempting to look imperious with bedhead and failing, "will not be necessary. I'll dress myself."

Rhys sweeps into a low bow. "Then I'll see you on the balcony."

He slips back out into the hallway and can still hear her cursing him all the way down the hall. Maybe she doesn't realize how superior their hearing is. Maybe it's still something her body is still blocking out, that she's not yet accustomed enough to it to think that they can hear her stomping through her loaned bedroom, rifling through her clothes in dismay, her worry feathering the air that he hasn't given her anything sensible in addition to not allowing her any time to pack a wardrobe for herself, only to discover quiet relief, pants and a loose tunic.

Maybe it's the bond, and maybe she doesn't realize any of it.

Rhys grimaces at the sunlight coming in through the window and vanishes into thin air.

-o-

No one tells you what to do when you find your soulmate. It seems like it should be obvious: you keep them. For as long as you can, at least.

But he can't keep Feyre, not without Tamlin charging up the mountain to take her back (though that would be its own tantalizing battle) and not for longer than a week each month, anyway, and all the resources he's found on true loves are vague on the post-discovery part. Most are concerned with how to find a soulmate in the first place: how do you tell if a person is interested, how do you keep persuading yourself to keep searching and keep opening up to other people when you could be so far away from finding the right one.

They don't talk about what to do when the person you're fated to be with is sitting at the other end of a table from you, and she doesn't know it.

Has really no one in all of Fae literature covered this? Surely he's just not looking hard enough.

The sun is rising over the frosty mountain peaks in beyond them, and a chill wind winds around his cloak. Feyre shivers in the morning breeze but her mouth is open.

Rhys scoops a slice of blueberry cobbler onto his bone china plate. His servants did a good job with this set-up; he normally takes his breakfasts in his study by the library (when he eats breakfast, which is mostly but not always). The balcony is another ivory-white structure carved into the cliff face, whorls and designs spiraling along the sides, so intricately that unless you looked closely it would be impossible to see where the art ended and the protective spellwork began. "You know, I almost missed your sullen silences after our time Under Mountain."

The table is laid with fruits, several varieties of eggs, steaming and spiced, and then a miniature mountain of pastries. In the center, a cluster of amethysts and clear quartz points gleams in the dawn, tiny palm stones scattered around its base. Rhys rubs the sleep from his eyes. He'll reward the attendants responsible later.

Feyre doesn't answer, but her breath comes in white puffs in front of her face and she hasn't touched her food. At first he thinks there's something wrong, but then a warmth blossoms in his chest- her wide-eyed wonder, her eyes counting all the colors she would need to paint, calculating how to get the mountains around her to glow the same way, with that ethereal inner light, on canvas.

And for a moment, he wishes she wasn't his mate. That she did not, by necessity, have to have the same hard core that he did and that she could just be this person forever, the one who stares off into the scenery around them as though she means to memorize it.

Because the thing about being unbreakable is that everyone tries to destroy you.

Rhys coughs. Loud.

"Is the food really so terrible?" He asks finally with a wry smile. "Or are you just pretending I'm not here?"

Feyre tears her eyes from the vista. "It wasn't that. It's just-"

It's just she sees the sunrise over his mountains the same way he sees the sunset: the sky carving his dominion into the stars, as though it is so permanent, so impossibly magical it couldn't help but last forever.

She picks a scone out of the pile of pastries and a poached egg. Protein, he notices with a smile.

"So what terrible surprise do you have waiting for me today?" She asks, after devouring several more poached eggs on tasting how good they are. "This lovely breakfast feels suspiciously like it's making up for what's coming next."

"Oh, only making good on a promise." He smiles at her consternation as she tries to figure it out. "Follow me."

-o-

She's seen old libraries before, there's no doubt about that.

The Night Court's library is cut into the rock at the center of the mountain, all stronghold center and carved shelves with scrolls and endless tomes stacked, shoved, and sometimes even organized. The shelves run all along the walls of the inner cavern, and the ceiling goes so high that it's hard for even fae eyes to find its end. There are no ladders here, higher shelves hundreds of feet above easily accessible by flight.

If you didn't have wings in the Night Court, well, being able to read books in its library is the least of your worries.

Rhys did not expect a grand reaction from her- he'd already seen her somewhat subdued reaction to Tamlin's books in her memories when he'd combed through them at the Spring Court- but he did hope perhaps for something more than icy stoicism. It had been no small feat getting the enchantments in place to moderate temperature in some caverns and prevent mildew or decay, and while he doesn't expect her to comment on it, a little _ooh_ would be gratifying.

"I don't suppose your breath has just been taken away seeing so much knowledge waiting to be revealed." Rhys gestures lazily at the gems in lanterns along the walls and several glowed to life. There are some denizens of his Court who shy from firelight, and so the crystals placed at odd intervals on the walls and reading nooks afford a workable compromise. Most Night Court fae are quite comfortable reading in the lower light, but Rhys is unsure how much of her new High Fae senses Feyre has access to.

Judging by her stilted movements, not a lot. Rhys raises the light from the gems a little more and sighs. Guess not.

At the very least, he's safe for at least a little while longer from her finding out about him being her mate.

The idea of telling her flits through his mind. It would, certainly, cause her pain. Probably she would accuse him of lying, consult Tamlin, and then slowly drive herself insane wondering which parts of their interactions were fueled by a bond she hadn't asked for and which were actually genuine. If he really was as fearsome as he liked his Court to believe, he would have said it right there.

"Have a seat," he says instead.

She does.

He pulls out a battered book of fables, opens it to the start of a chapter, and then has Feyre read. At first, she does not believe that this is actually what he came here to do, to tutor her in fae early reader literature, but when he smiles and taps the first page again across from her at the library table, panic sets in. After a few deeps breaths and several more dangerous glances, she begins, one hand combed through her hair to keep it out of the way as she reads.

"The grasshoppers were bow, bone, bouncing...mer-merri-merrily..."

Rhys grimaces into his own tome. "Do you mind actually trying, or is this solely for my benefit?"

Feyre looks up and it's probably the angriest he's ever seen her. She doesn't say anything, just watches him over the book, eyes sharp and bright.

"Fine," Rhys says, placing his book onto the table. "I'd thought that Tamlin would have worked more on this with you more after you left."

Feyre's breath escapes in a hiss. "There was a lot to take care of with the Court, and I was still, am still..." She lets her hand fall as she trails off, and her hair tumbles down over the side of her face. Even though she doesn't go into it, he knows what she means. Adjusting, running through hallways in the middle of the night to test herself, to learn how to use this new body, this new weapon she'd be reborn into. Sometimes when their bond pulled too tight he'd worried she'd chosen running because it had been too hard for him to filter out how badly he'd wanted to fly.

He traces out the next line with an elegant finger. "I find the words that I know first and see if I can figure out what the ones I don't know are based on what the sentence is saying. You know there are grasshoppers and that they're bouncing. You know a lot more than you're giving yourself credit for. Use it to help solve the sentence."

Feyre frowns, but it's not entirely without humor. "You say solve it like it's a puzzle or something."

"Everything's a puzzle when you look closely. You've got enough keys to figure this one out." Rhys leans back in his chair. "Go on. We've got time."

She takes a deep breath and turns her attention back to the fable. "Thee grasshoppers were bouncing merrily..."

"Three." He corrects, pointing to the word. "Not thee. See the 'r' there?"

"Gods," she swears at it, like it's its fault. "Three grasshoppers were bouncing merrily along the short."

"The what?" Rhys laughs.

"The short."

She must have read "shore" too fast and just gone with what sounded plausible. "Tell me, Feyre darling, does that even sound correct?"

"I don't know! Nothing in this place makes sense." She slams a hand down on the book. Because she knows it's wrong, she knows there's a problem but she doesn't know how to fix it, and lately her whole life's been that way. She's probably still not used to the full extent of her strength because the force of her palm sends dust up from the pages.

"Understandable as that is," Rhys waves the particles out of his face, "kindly refrain from taking your frustrations out on the books. Some are as old as me. You know, ancient and venerable."

Feyre gives him a somewhat withering look, but removes her palm from the page. "I don't understand why everyone is so obsessed with getting me to read."

"Because we're all horrible people who want you to suffer." Rhys deadpans, yawning as the midday sun hits a window light stories and stories above them. "That, or we'd like to survive your next inevitable life-or-death literacy test."

Another eye roll, but more subdued. "I never got bothered so much about this before."

It's hard for Rhys to tell whether she means "before when I was human" or "before all these faeries came into my life" but either would be enough. "There are always going to be challenges. I suppose if you hadn't killed the wolf you'd have run into a long, harsh winter. It's just different problems, for us."

She does not ask whether "us" means "people in this room, including Feyre" or "faeries in general" and he does not clarify.

They settle back into it, Feyre doggedly plowing through the fable's text and Rhys snorting whenever something truly nonsensical passes her lips. It's a fairly repetitive little story, and once she sees the beat and swing of the words, her footing is much more stable. She reads the last sentence all in a rush: "And at dusk when all the grasshoppers bounced home again, how many grasshoppers went bouncing back in the end?"

Rhys applauds. "And how many were there?"

"Three, of course. They went along the shore and dallied, but then they got their food and all made it back home." Feyre furrows her brow, still too elated to grasp why he's asking her such a simple question, her face flushed with victory. "Why wouldn't there be three?"

He shrugs, as realization dawns on her where this story is from, exactly the last circumstances under which she read it last. "Why indeed?"

She's about to say something when the library walls groan and shiver around them and something prickles along his spine.

"Get behind me." Rhys moves between Feyre and the door. You'd think that these things would give him a damn break during his one week with Feyre, but no, of course not. Judging by the sounds, they don't even have long before it's on them. "If I'm not mistaken you have some experience with these."

"Rhys." Feyre stands and moves, all the old hollowness and hunter's grit back in her eyes, the victory of the last few moments gone. "What's happening?"

Everything. Nothing. "Just another day in the Night Court. Now," he says, not turning to look at her as the door to the library shudders open and a dark fog creeps in, "if you have to focus on something, make it me. Don't pay attention to it and stand exactly in the same place."

"Rhys-"

But then the Boge whisps around them and everything goes cold and silent except for a single, low, and persistent voice: _look at me, behold me, acknowledge me. Look at me and so I can rend your tender flesh.  
_

 _Please,_ Rhys says, looking directly at it, his eyes picking out the eyes, the shape already forming from the dark mist, _be my guest._

There's a blur of motion as the Boge tumbles into form and a cold wind blows through the mountain caves. This is how you fight the monsters in your head: you make them real because you can't fight figments of your imagination. That's the trick with things like Boges: you escape their notice by pretending they don't exist, but they'll still be out there.

But once you let the fear take shape and exist alongside you, then you can hurt it. He can't battle mist and despair.

What he can fight is flesh and blood and hooking claws.

 _I will split your skin and devour your bones, Night Lord._ The Boge rises over him fast, a mass of knives and curving fingers, wings and razor blade spines. _And when I have broken you so badly that you wish for death, then I will destroy this other one while you watch._

 _There is no one else here_. Rhys shifts his hands into claws and swipes them through a blow aimed at his shoulder. The Boge's flesh is sticky and dark, and it coats the blades of his hands in a shadowy murk. _Slow. You'll be easy to dispatch._

The Boge doesn't have a separate consciousness, no mind that Rhys can destroy; it preys on its victims' minds and insecurities the same way Rhys does, except it's not always a physical entity. It has no will of its own, no depth. It's just a single, deliberate imperative: shred whatever lures it into being. But now that it's real and circling him around the library floor, he can tear it apart.

It's less elegant, sure, but he doesn't mind occasionally doing things this way.

 _You have underestimated me._ The Boge whispers all his secret fears to him in waves: red-stained beds peppered with splinters, wings in ruined tatters, and a single persistent image of Rhys, head bowed, bloody and broken, kneeling in the Night Court's throne room as an ash sword is pressed to his neck, conquered at last. _Did you really think_ , the monster around him and in him says, _that I would not notice what is so close to you, Night Lord?_

And then there's a new image- one that's so striking that he almost thinks it's real- Feyre accidentally catching its eye, trying to look away and failing, fighting another part of the Boge, her own eyes wide and white, having nothing with which to defend herself. The Boge strikes so fast that he almost doesn't notice when a spike from its tail scissors through Feyre's side. She winces but uses a broken library table leg to fight it off as blood runs down her side. But she's not lasting long; the wound is too deep and she staggers to the floor.

Rhys stabs one hand clean through to the Boge's heart and tears the many aortaed structure out. For a moment, the creature changes into Feyre, her eyes wide and panicking as his hand rips her heart out of her chest easy as breathing. Then Rhys slashes the illusion in half.

Black blood steams over his hands and onto the library rug as the monster crumples. Rhys' breath comes out in pants, and he stands there, hand still stuck into an empty chest cavity, the dead Boge's vile stench curling around him as he tries to school his features back to normal.

It was a trick. Feyre was standing in the wrong place, and he'd know if she was hurt. He'd know if it was different. He'd know right away. That's what everything he's heard about bonds like this say, that's what it was like the last time she died.

But it still takes him more than a moment to turn, and he still gives the invisible string between a gentle tug just to check before facing her.

Feyre is standing exactly where she had been, in almost the same position, as far as he can tell. Rhys' shoulders relax, barely perceptible.

"Welcome to the Night Court," he says dryly, tossing the dead heart into the air where it dissolves into wisps of black smoke before even hitting the floor. "I hope you enjoy your stay."

"So that's how you fight things like that?" Feyre asks. She's staring at the almost-dissolved hulk of the Boge. "Head-on?"

"If there's a better way to combat your worst fears, I certainly don't know it." Rhys wipes his arm off on a sleeve. The stains will come out of the rug just fine; it's just that any of it left on skin or a living thing will remain behind. He'll have to have his servants scrub it off his clothes later.

And suddenly he's just damn tired. He thought this was going to be easy, or at least easier than having Feyre at the Spring Court, knowing exactly when she and Tamlin got close. All this is a different version of the same hell, and even without the bond telling him how repulsive he looks with soot and globs and blood dripping off of him, he wants to get out of this room.

Out of this room and away from that illusion the Boge fabricated: his hand tearing Feyre to shreds.

He rubs his temples and summons several servants with a thought. "I'll need some time to clean up. If you'd like to explore on your own or read, you have my leave of the castle. The servants will show you where is and isn't safe."

Feyre looks down at the floor and then looks back up at him. He can see the question in her head before she asks it, and still he almost doesn't believe the words when he hears them.

"Will you teach me how to do that?"

Rhys laughs, but more at the situation. "What, you also want to be covered in dream dirt and in immediate need of a bath?" He smiles darkly and holds out his arms for her. "By all means. I would certainly hate to be a bad host."

Her expression doesn't change. "I mean, I want to learn how to fight. Like that. I want to know how to defend myself in this body and clearly you know how." She takes a deep breath. "If you're going to keep me here for a week each month for the rest of my life, then it's only fair."

Of course. His mate is only asking him to prepare her to fight the very worst terrors that Prythian has to offer, to let her go into battle and have it be his fault if she dies because he doesn't instruct her carefully enough. That's fair. He's about to tell her how exactly fair that is considering their situation, maybe just for the pleasure of watching her recoil when she realizes either she's stuck with him forever or doomed to eternal unhappiness, when he notices that she's holding her breath.

She's actually worried he'll say no, Cauldron boil the whole thing to hell and back.

"As you wish." Rhys exhales and bows. "But after dinner. In the meantime," he snaps his fingers and the doors open to a bevy of tattooed shades, "my servants will attend you."

He makes to go, but Feyre stops him. Her hand is on the old book of fables, on the page she'd just finished reading aloud. "Wait."

Rhys leans against the doors and cocks his head.

"Why did you have me read this?" Her dark eyes cut straight into him, and for a moment he wonders if she's seeing more into their bond than he thought.

"To prove to yourself that you're capable of overcoming any fear." He bows. "Now if you'll excuse me."

And even as he disappears through corridors and wends back through the Night Court in a rush of shadows, that last moment stays with him: Feyre's eyes widening just for a moment, knowing that no longer could the story of the grasshoppers Amarantha had used embarrass her or be used as a weapon against her, that in conquering it she had made it hers; her mouth curled up in a smile the likes of which he hadn't seen since Fire Night all those months ago, that same rush sparkling in her eyes like stars.

* * *

 **Author's Note:** Hey guys! Thanks so much for reading. It's a longer chapter this time, and I think I'll try to keep updates about this length or a little more now that I'm off-book. What will Rhys teaching Feyre to defend herself in her new High Fae body be like? Tune in next time to find out (hint: probably frustrating and hilarious with a dash of danger).

One brief housekeeping thing: I'd hoped to have this finished before ACOMAF comes out, but due to school I might not manage it. Never fear! I will continue to update this until completion, it just may take longer. I'm still debating whether to read ACOMAF when it comes out or wait because I don't know much about the conflict brewing with Hybern beyond the fact that there is one, but I also kind of want to see this fic through before reading book 2? I'll figure it out!

Thanks also for all the great reviews and encouragement! You guys are fantastic- hearing from you always makes my day. Anyway, enjoy this one, and get pumped for chapter nine!

-cy.


	9. boundary lines

His personal servants have laid out a fresh tunic and pants for him on his bed, and he manages to shuck off his dirty, Boge-tainted clothes, wash, and get about halfway dressed before collapsing.

When he comes to, it's nearly sunset.

"All the boiling hells," Rhys seethes, struggles into his shirt, and strides down the hall in a mess of shadows and loose ends, looking just unkempt enough to pass for roguish but not quite so much to give away the fact that he had, quite literally, fallen asleep for several hours.

None of his servants came to get him, so the first thing he'd done on waking (after swearing in a more extended and colorful fashion) was check on Feyre. The eye tattoo on her palm revealed that she was on the balcony where they'd eaten breakfast, wrapped in several blankets and continuing to plow through the children's book. It had been a clear enough late afternoon- there were clouds but nothing to fully obscure the sun, so she had plenty of light to read by.

Judging from her placement in the book, either she'd skipped around from fable to fable or she'd made a fair amount of progress. Rhys doesn't feel like Feyre is the kind of person to skip around, and he smiles despite himself.

When he reaches the balcony, he hesitates. She's reading it out loud, still slowly like before but softer, like she doesn't want to disturb any of them. Exhilaration still flickers at the edges of her mind like tangy sparklers, and each time she reads a sentence correctly and understands, however short it is, everything flares up again.

Rhys clears his throat and walks out on the small balcony. Part of him wants to leave her here undisturbed, let her be victorious for once without cutting it short. But, he supposes, he's never going to be that kind of person. "The ceremony for the end of the day is beginning soon, if you'd like to see it."

Feyre looks up, one hand still on the practice book. "A ceremony?"

"The daily rite the Night Court performs at dusk." Rhys snaps his fingers. "The Dawn Court greets the sun, the Day Court marks its zenith at noon, and we take it from dusk until the next day. Follow me and I'll show you. The view from the top of the mountain is even better, or so I'm told."

A pair of servants appears from the shadows and he directs them to take the book back to his study, somewhere on his desk.

"Or so you're told?" Feyre stands and stretches. Behind her, all the mountain peaks are painted in slabs of color. "That sounds like a somewhat dubious recommendation."

It sounds dubious only because he thinks every view from this mountain is the best view, but he will never say this to Feyre. Or out loud to anyone.

One of the servants attempts to close the book to transport it more easily, but Feyre makes a noise. She doesn't want to lose her place.

Shaking his head but not wholly annoyed, Rhys raises his hand and manifests a slim bookmark in the shape of a black wing. He offers it to Feyre, who at first does not believe that she's allowed to touch it, but then takes it when he continues to offer it. "Use this and kindly let the shades handle it. If you make me late for my own ceremony I'll never hear the end of it."

Feyre tucks the bookmark in the middle of the story about the fox and the farmer's daughter and he takes her hand.

"Is this really necessary?" She asks as he tugs her along the corridors. "I'm following you. I won't run off."

"Oh, I'm sure." Rhys pulls her a little faster. "But if you think my Court is all kindness and hospitality, it's time to disabuse you of that notion."

"What do you mean?" Feyre fights to get out of his grip, but either she's not really trying or she's still not sure exactly how hard she has to pull to break free.

"I mean that there are worse things here than you've seen." That they would very soon be waking up to come out and play. "Can you perhaps hurry? I wasn't kidding about being late."

She huffs, but their pace quickens. "Worse things like the Boge?"

Rhys tsks and pulls open a door. "The Boge is not a member of my Court. It's no member of any Prythian Court, which is why no one enjoys its wandering around. It's from Hybern, and tends to stay there except on increasingly less rare occasions when it chooses to make our lives here more interesting."

"So what kind of faeries _are_ in your Court?" She ducks behind a tapestry with him and they ascend a hidden set of stairs, stone walls and occasional gemstone light their only company as they climb and climb. It's an old shortcut that he found when he was young, much younger than this, and has proven so useful he's never made it more accessible. He's fairly impressed that Feyre hasn't tripped yet.

"Dangerous ones."

"That's very helpful." She says, dryly. "Can you give me an example?"

He stops on the stairs. He wants to say _perhaps you remember someone named Amarantha_. That would put an end to this line of questioning immediately. And while Amarantha may not have been a member of the Night Court, her ruthlessness was something many of its denizens admired. Rhys had certainly admired it, for a time, admired it the way a chess grandmaster would acknowledge another's skill.

But that was before he realized exactly where that ruthlessness would take him.

"You want an example?" He repeats, voice low.

He could tell her about the many, many fae creatures which have stained the Night Court's throne room floor red and black when they grappled fruitlessly with him for succession before their minds were shattered into pieces like poisoned glass. He could tell her about how shadows here hide more than corners, things that wait for passersby. He could tell her about the night terrors, dark shapes with hooked hands and faceless masks that stand silent and still outside her bedroom door at night, stopped only by his protective magic.

Instead, he takes a lock of Feyre's hair between his fingers and lifts it to his lips. Her breathing is uneven and her dark brown eyes flick back and forth in the halflight of the crystals ensconced into the stairway walls and slivers of setting sun. And for a moment he can't tell if the sharp spikes of emotion radiating out from her are because she's angry at him for getting this close or if she's angry at herself for not knowing what she would do if he got closer.

He leans in. "Me."

Feyre holds his gaze and for a moment the bond between them is so taut that he sees through her eyes- his own lips slightly parted, eyes half-closed, and a question drifts between them that he's not sure who's asking anymore.

She laughs one breathy "ha" and abruptly turns away. Rhys swallows, collects himself, and they make good time up the rest of the stairs. When they reach the terrace, the last dregs of sunset are burning out along the mountain range in cuts of light coming out jagged through clouds colored brilliant orange and gold and fuchsia.

Sometimes he's amazed that there is a Dawn Court but no Dusk Court. Maybe the Night Court got the dusk and the night dominions both because all the other fae figured that giving them sunsets with the darkness would be more fair.

In the evening, the terrace garden gleams with hanging pots of plants, carefully tended wisteria curling around the wooden slats of pergolas, rock cairns at each of the four cardinal directions of the terrace like a compass. As dusk settles in, the plants make soft rustling sounds in the wind and Rhys takes his place at the head of the procession of lanterns. Feyre falls back along the sides, watching.

To a human, or perhaps to a fae not looking hard enough, the lanterns would appear to be floating mid-air by themselves. Look a little harder, or wait until the dark enveloped them, and it would become clear that they were in fact held by almost translucent Night Court fae, their tattoos glittering in shadowscript against the evening sky.

Rhys leads the procession through the corridor of plants draped over the frames of the arbors until they reach a stone dais. The lantern-carriers slowly fade into vision as the light changes from fire to shades of blue.

The Night Court is home to the bleakness, things that tear you apart in the middle of the night. But more than anything it's a mess of contradictions, wonder and terror in equal measure because without one it's impossible to see the other: there must first be darkness before there can be stars.

On the dais, Rhys accepts a lantern from one of the servants. The rest hold their positions in two lines along the pathway. He waits until the last of the sun has sunk below the mountain range and then extinguishes the lantern with a flick of his hand and says, "Night has fallen."

The lantern-bearers blow their lights out. And for a moment, the whole garden terrace is dark and eerie, plants hulking shapes almost like nightmare creatures. He can feel a prickle of edginess from Feyre, her unease about why they're all standing around in the dark, and he sends her a single word: wait.

Then, slowly, like a fiddler tuning up, the blossoms of the overhanging plants open their heavy heads and glow. The stars come out in pinprick holes in the sky and all the tattoos glitter in the moonlight, like ink freshly written, a promise renewed.

Feyre holds her eye tattoo up to the night sky, and he catches the full force of her thoughts. No barriers, no shields, just a breath and delight moving her hand back and forth in the starlight and watching the colors of the design change. Her thoughts come in clear: is this what he missed, locked up below the Mountain, separated from the night sky and unable to do this each evening, watching the dusk open up into a greater darkness that thrilled him as much as it threatened to swallow him whole? Was this what he fought so hard to come back to?

He meets her eyes across the corridor of dark lanterns and the galaxy of ink between them, his own tattoo lit up beneath his collar, curling in galaxy spirals over his heart.

And he does not need the bond between them to answer her question.

-o-

They have dinner out on the terrace and Feyre tells him she wants to paint this place.

"I'll have to rethink my whole technique. The way those flowers hold the light and shadow..." She's been trying to apply herself to her food, but mostly has just succeeded in getting distracted by plants and contrast. "I never knew that there were this many colors in the dark."

"Of course there are." Rhys is almost confused- she's fae, hadn't she noticed? But this is the human side of Feyre talking, the one that grew up seeing only one color of shadow. Or maybe only noticing one color, because that was all she needed to notice in order to hunt.

This isn't a part of her that he wants to go away, but they don't have much time out here, not like this. There are already things moving in the Night Court, and soon there will be challenges, blood and drums, and the more traitorous among his subjects will soon remember why he and he alone is master of this Court.

"Am I boring you?" Feyre says. She says it pointedly, like she means for it to be a joke, but mostly it sounds like she's never going to mention painting again.

He laughs, perhaps a bit too darkly. Great. Rhys is been fairly certain that he hasn't been broadcasting his emotions on his face- has she intuited it because she knows him or because of the bond?

"I'm just anticipating training you." He says, half-honestly. The other half is decidedly less honest and much more disapproving that any of this is happening at all.

Because the thing about this bond is that it's not going to end well. Sure, Feyre is his mate. But as much as faeries convince themselves that mates should stay together, it's not always the case. Sometimes people choose differently, either for political reasons or personal ones. And he has no doubt what Feyre will choose.

Given the choice between someone who made you suffer and someone you'd already died to save, well.

It's not hard to predict which way the game would end.

She gives him a look that tells him she knows exactly what he isn't telling her, and for a moment he worries she has much better control of her end of their bond than he's given her credit for until she accidentally drops a piece of beef on the ground and her unfiltered regret overwhelms him.

It comes in waves: shock that this happened to her because she's normally so careful, terror that he'll make fun of her if she picks it up because it's still good, (probably, the terrace floor looks clean), self-hatred at wasting food, nervous weighing of options. Berating herself for even thinking these things anymore because she's past that life, then exhaustion because she's not past it, not at all, not really and not ever.

Rhys grips the table. This can't go on. It's already half-unbearable normally, completely unbearable when she's with Tamlin, and as much as he's gratified having these constant reassurances that Feyre's still alive, if they're to exist apart from each other he's going to need space from her in his head.

"Is it at all possible," he says, pinching the bridge of his nose, "for you to shield?"

"Shield?" Feyre's embarrassment is overtaken by confusion and then a different embarrassment, and it all comes at him so raw it's like a punch to the gut. "What do you mean?"

He stands and shadows whisk over the table, clearing plates, recentering gemstone lights and straightening chairs. One picks up the dropped piece of beef and makes a delighted noise of surprise.

Rhys takes a deep breath. "You are aware, I hope, that the Night Court trades in emotional manipulation and breaking through a target's mental barriers."

Feyre nods. "You held people's, faeries', minds back Under the Mountain."

"Before then too." Rhys waves a hand dismissively. "It's a hallmark of our magic. Some Courts have powers that manifest outwardly, like Tamlin's physical strength. Others, like mine, are turned inward, focusing on controlling the mind or being able to page through it."

If Tamlin hasn't told her this, then someone's got to. Otherwise she's going to find out eventually, and she's already going to be upset for not knowing for this long.

"Do you recall the particulars of how you were brought back to life as a High Fae?" He asks it innocuously, nothing to alarm her.

"Each of the seven High Lords presented me with a seed," she says, somewhat uncertain. It's all stuff she's heard through rumor, whispered down the halls after her or seen through Rhys' eyes when she lay dying and then when she was dead. "But no one's told me that there were lasting consequences beyond that."

Rhys rakes a hand through this hair and turns to face the dark night sky. Of course not. Why would anyone make his job easier?

"You were resurrected using a drop of magic from each Fae Court." He says. "What that means is that you carry that magic with you now, and you now have some, perhaps minimal, capacity for each brand of Court magic."

She looks at him somewhat blankly. "I do?"

Rhys sighs and he can already feel her astonishment. He shuts down his end of their bond as best he can to shield her from his anger. He can understand not wanting to overwhelm Feyre with new things, but there comes a point where you have to let someone know that they have power. Probably Tamlin was going to tell her once she was more in control of her fae powers, or until she ran into her magic naturally.

But they didn't have time for that.

"It's part of why decisions to make a human a High Fae are so rare. You are," he pauses before continuing, trying to figure out a way to say it nicely and, finding none, just going for it, "either a very useful pawn or an untrained, unknown power on the board. If you haven't been invited to the other Courts already, you'll soon find invitations from them."

Feyre shakes her head. "So you're telling me that all of a sudden I have magic now?"

"You've had magic ever since you came back. Chances are, you've probably already noticed it. Your improved senses, physical speed, courtesy of Tamlin's Spring magic." He goes for it. "You also possess some small amount of Night Court magic, which for both our sakes I am going to hope is not completely unusable."

"Why would I want to hold people's minds?" Feyre does not look particularly comforted by this thought.

"Because it's similar to shielding your own mind, which you most definitely will need to do. Often, if not always." Rhys walks back to her. "There are plenty of things in my Court that would be only too happy to feast on your emotions. Or you."

They make their way back down to Rhys' study again, and fifteen minutes into instructing her and seeing the frustration build behind her eyes, he can tell it's going to be a long evening. Feyre has been silent for ages, eyes closed with a frown line etched between her brows. He's told her to picture walls, to lock all the doors she can imagine, visualization tricks his own father taught him at a young age. It doesn't matter what you concentrate on; it can be anything- as long as the intention is there.

He pushes the practice book that Feyre's been using as a focus off to the side, bored. "You're never going to learn if you don't fail at least once, possibly several times."

They've been getting ready for round one for at least ten minutes. When his father was teaching him how to do it, he wasn't half so kind. It was just barrage after barrage until Rhys learned to get his shield up and keep it raised.

Feyre doesn't say anything, just opens her eyes to give him a terrible look.

"Good. Channel that into your shield." He yawns and covers his mouth with a hand. Cauldron, it's not even late evening yet. He still has a long night ahead of him. "Because I'm going to try to break through it in thirty seconds."

It probably seems pretty horrible of him to do this to her, to force her to get good enough deflecting him right away and push her to her limits. But the thing is, if he doesn't do it, then someone else will.

Then the seconds are up, and he can tell because he was counting them and because Feyre must have been counting them too, because she meets his eyes and suddenly it's rabbits, deer, an eternity of snow-covered trees, ash and only ash in the fireplace. Her shield is a ghost, a flimsy thing he doesn't have to tear through so much as brush aside.

The memory he tumbles into is her opening a front door after a hunt that produced nothing but bruises and scraped-up palms, and when she gets back home her family is sitting at their table, quiet and hollow-eyed. One of her sisters rises and goes to their bedroom to hide her hungry tears, and another sister stays sitting, but her fingernails pick at a painted flower on the table's ledge. Something in Feyre seethes, but in her memory, she does nothing.

He lets her mind go.

She shivers, and this close to her thoughts, he feels the cold fury slice right through him. He shouldn't savor it this much, but he does, this warmth and this much effort put into hating him.

Fine, he tells himself, even as some part of him wants to fix this, put a stop to all of it and tell her that he'll protect her forever. Let her hate him. Hatred is a fine motivator, he should know.

"Did you put any effort into that at all?" He asks her. It's more of a rhetorical question; he doesn't expect her to dignify his sarcasm with a response. "Try harder."

"Don't you think I've been trying hard enough already?" Something in her trembles, like her composure is just a glass on a shelf, threatening to topple off and shatter. "What do you think I did all that time I was Under the Mountain? What do you think I've been doing every day since I got back? I've been trying, Rhysand."

The way she says his full name hits him like a slap.

"I tried so hard that someone killed me. I died and then I came back, and all that everyone around me keeps asking is for me to keep trying. Learn to read, Feyre." She imitates his mocking voice, and it's not a poor job. "Learn to fight in your new body. Learn to keep other faeries out of your head. Learn all these new things and when you don't master them immediately expect me to make fun of you. I'm tired, okay? I'm sick of being made fun of for not knowing how to do something you've known all your life perfectly."

And now he gets it, why Tamlin was doing what he was. Why he made sure that Feyre had time to herself, to recover and to breathe. And perhaps some of it was because he was busy putting the Spring Court back together, but some of it surely was calculated to give Feyre this time to become okay again with being herself.

Rhys has pushed her too far. And maybe he should have known better, being her mate and all, what happens when you ask too much of someone too near their breaking points.

"Then fine." He says. "Practice on your own for a while and we'll resume tomorrow."

Maybe he's tired. Probably that's it. Probably he's just thinking more of what he's got to do tonight after Feyre goes to sleep, and that's what makes him act this way, not because he's actually falling into this idea of them working out. He's already decided it'll stop, that he'll find a way out for both of them; he just needs Feyre to learn to shield so she doesn't drive him insane in the meantime.

That's all.

That's all, he tells himself, glancing back to make sure she's not upset. That's all, he says, one hand tracing over the cover of the fable book. That's all.

When his eyes meet Feyre's, it's like being hit by a blunt instrument.

She's not practiced at paging through memories yet, and her grip on him is even more tenuous- most of his effort, once he gets past the shock of it, is geared toward blocking her clumsy attempts to hold his mind rather than shutting her out initially. Her approach is less the careful slice of a sharp blade and more the bluster of a meat cleaver, and it's hard to block without hurting her.

She doesn't see much, but she does get flashes of blood on flagstones, dark halls reaching up into dark crevices, shapes passing silently through the corridors at night. She sees what he senses: every mind in this hall listening, wondering what on earth has caught their High Lord off balance.

She feels what they think, almost as one: _there is a weakness_.

And that is what he cannot, will not have.

Rhys pushes her out, his hands enveloped in ghostly claws. "What," he asks, pining her against the wall, his voice dark and flat, eerily cold, "was that?"

"Revenge." Feyre winces. She still has a headache, a dull pulse that mimics itself in Rhys' own head. Her breathing quickens and when she speaks again her voice is in a different octave than it was before. "Why? Didn't like it?"

He grits his teeth and she hardens her eyes. There is a moment when both of them are so intent on destroying the other that the very air seems to vibrate between them with the force of their stares, even as he can feel the warmth of her body between him and the wall, can feel the same sensation reflected back through her: his hands braced on either side of her shoulders, her breath in warm gusts near his collarbone, the way her pulse leaps in her throat.

He lowers his head to her neck just to make her tense up, just to see all those muscles in her tighten and move as one. "The next time you try to break into my mind, make sure it's to kill me, Feyre darling. Because I can promise you the consequences won't be half so lenient as they are now."

His mind is his own, and no matter who Feyre is or what she is, there is only one person who holds dominion over him, and that is himself.

He strokes one spectral claw down her cheek and she gasps, not because it's painful. "Remember what the other skill of Night Court fae is?"

Her breathing is ragged but her eyes are fear and fire. He can call up every worst nightmare, every starving hope and every fever dream she's ever had, every biting pain but instead he shows her pleasure: all the quiet wants she's nursed and tried to hide; he shows her all this at once in a whirlwind fantasy, a lifetime of paints scattered around them, books and treasuries, wings hitting the sky, the warmth of belonging to someone, and the sharp spike of longing as you watch someone you know from so far away that you can only see their silhouette, but you know who is it by their gait.

He shows her all this because he has felt it, felt it so hard it hurts.

He could take her farther, push her over the edge to ecstasy and euphoria, but he doesn't. Lines of consent are thinner here, and as much as he'd like to show her the full extent of his powers, give her a taste of just who she's messing with, he's also no Amarantha.

Besides, what he's doing now, making her eyelids flutter shut and her skin heat up, that's enough.

His lips graze her neck and she shivers, head tipped to the side. "Tell me you want me to stop."

The wall behind her is cold, but Feyre's face is flushed. She makes no reply beyond a shaky exhale of breath.

Gently, Rhys' mouth finds her ear and he whispers: "This, Feyre, is how you get revenge."

He slowly releases her mind and steps back. Feyre's dizzy and disoriented and so is Rhys, feeling the confusion and sudden shift echoing through their bond. It takes a few moments for her to blink and come back to herself, and when she does, she's furious.

"You really are monstrous." She says, trying to get his scent out of her head, trying to figure out where he fabricated her emotional response and what she really felt.

"I warned you, didn't I?" Rhys spreads his hands, but the words have barely left his mouth before she's gone.

* * *

 **Author's Note** : Thanks again for reading, everyone! I had a lot of fun writing this one, and hopefully you've enjoyed reading it. Let's see, a hint for next time: I'm hoping in Chapter 10 I can reveal a theory I've had for a while about Rhys and his magic. Get pumped!

And now, a few review replies I haven't gotten to: **damn** : ha! This legit made me laugh out loud. **chthonicly** : Thanks so much! I get really nervous on the chapters where I'm building more of the world, lol- it's really fun, I'm just relying a lot more on my imagination than the text, so it's good to hear it's working well. **Potato** : oh man, high praise! Pacing is one of my struggles, so this is super great to hear. I'm so glad you're digging it. **Leah** : omg, wow! I'm really happy that this has been so addictive (evil cackle).

I'm hopeful to have 10 done before ACOMAF comes out. I'm likely going to try to finish this before reading ACOMAF so I don't spoil myself (slash, provide the fandom an AU version of things post-ACOTAR, worst case scenario), but I'll keep you guys informed.

Thanks as always for being so rad!

-cy.


	10. forfeit

**Author's Note:**

I finally read ACOMAF and OMG! I'm so sorry for the lack of updates- I got slammed with exams for school and only had time to read it now (I know, I know) and WOW I did not believe this could happen.

A little housekeeping: all the previous chapters were written before ACOMAF came out, and all the chapters that follow are probably going to be me doing ACOMAF from Rhys' POV with some hidden scenes and other good stuff added in. So yeah, **from this point on you should probably assume spoilers for ACOMAF**. I...probably will also need to raise the content rating in the future from T to M, so keep an eye out for that.

Anyway, thanks for reading and sticking with this! I made this chapter extra long because you guys are the greatest. And now, back to our favorite couple.

* * *

It's not like he doesn't trust Feyre.

It's more like he doesn't trust anyone in this side of his Court.

Because this is the way it has to be, a constant tug-of-war between dream and nightmare, constantly drawing his enemies in closer until one of them breaks. It's a bad kind of dance, to have to go as deeply into the darkness as he forces his opponents to go, but it's what he is and always has been, tiptoeing on the edge of monstrous.

And what he always will be, darkness incarnate even as he craves the stars.

Rhys moves through the halls, following the strand of the bond to take him to Feyre. It's night and there are corridors that end suddenly in cliffs and spirits who haunt certain rooms because they're tired of being lonely. There are things in this darkness that even he hasn't catalogued, that have lived in the Hewn City longer than he's been its master.

And sure, it probably sounds stupid to have kept her here when there are other places. Another city, perhaps, that would suit her better.

But there is one thing he has sworn ever since he came into power, a promise he kept even when he was Under the Mountain, and that was to keep that city safe. As much as he would like to trust her, the cruel and calculating part of his head still knows she is an unknown variable, made all the more dangerous by being his mate.

And he knows the stories about lords wreathed in green and half-demon suitors. He knows how they end and he knows the score. It's not like he and Feyre are going to end up together.

The throne room of the Night Court is less a room where he sits and presides and more a place where he _rules_. These past few weeks, Rhys has spent almost every night in here, answering challenges, hosting lavish and drunken parties, dispensing funds to repair crumbling bridges and collapsed corridors, administering punishments, and addressing those fae who haven't seen him in months, years, who wonder if he's really as terrifying as he makes himself out to be.

He's done enough terrible things for what he wants to know that he's not going to get a happy ending.

Still, Feyre is standing dead center in the empty room, head tilted up to the banners and sigils tucked into the cavern's high ceiling. He's not sure if she's still mad at him or if he's still mad at her for getting past his shield. The bond blurs it sometimes, and she's not paying attention.

"It's getting late," he says. Waits.

He asked the Morrigan to guard her while they're here, to watch out as his charge roams from his suite of rooms in the cut-rock palace to other places. Mor had said it might just be easier to bar some doors to her, give Feyre a set number of rooms to peruse instead of setting guards and shadows to protect her. "You wouldn't have had to deal with a Boge if we did it my way," Mor had snickered earlier. "Suit yourself."

But Mor was not Under the Mountain. And as much as she's experienced the horrors of this peak, she eventually escaped them. There are days when Rhys still wakes up convinced that there's no light from the sky because there is no sky, no stars, that it's all endless glittering caverns and a single hollow smile yearning to swallow him whole.

He's been awake the same nights that Feyre has, when she sits bolt upright in cold terror, wondering what phase the moon's at before she realizes that doesn't matter anymore. Sometimes he's not sure who's having the nightmare or where it originated, but he shields harder all the next day, hoping it wasn't him.

He knows what it's like to be trapped.

So he will not restrict her movement, but he assigns her shadows, even though Mor is getting exhausted from fending off unwelcome visitors or inventing excuses for him when Rhys is so tired that he sleeps through meetings.

Feyre, of course, will see none of this. Because that is who he is, master of shadows and legerdemain, and he will not reveal more than he has to, especially when it's about the things he's trying to protect.

Feyre casually glances over her shoulder at him in the throne room. "This place draws you in."

She's not wrong: the emotional residue here is a black hole. It's the involuntary shiver of victory and defeat, the tart spike of having everything you want within reach and not quite being able to touch it. It's temptation and rage, spoiled hopes and slashes of satiation. This, he thinks, is what humans far from fae mean when they talk about ghosts, that brush of memory sliding over your shoulder like a foreign glance, a certainty that something is waiting if you'd only turn around and look.

"Well, it's a throne room for a reason," he says. "Come on, let's go for another scintillating round of study and try not to kill each other."

They walk through the halls, all deserted.

It used to happen less frequently, faeries coming after him once the sun slipped below the horizon, when the Nightmare Court was all he had and even it seemed like it would slide from his grasp. High Fae would be deferential in the halls and plot to depose him in their heads. He stopped it, through blood and death and humiliation; he broke bones and stained every tile of this floor with fae blood.

He will have to do it again. Kier no doubt wonders: Rhys can see it when the faerie looks at him in meetings, wondering what kind of High Lord would leave a female, his own rejected daughter, in charge of their most precious city.

He'll deal with it. It just-

It just makes him so tired sometimes.

"You don't want me there after dark." Feyre says finally, when they enter her room again.

Rhys runs a hand through his hair. "Oddly enough, my Court is dangerous, even with me present."

"Really? I would never have guessed." Feyre looks ready to throw something at him, but then something in her deflates and all the fight leaves her. This has been happening more and more and it never fails to unnerve him. "Between you an Tamlin, no one tells me what's going on. No one's honest with me, Rhys."

It's the first time she's called him by this name, the shorter version, the one that doesn't sound like she's trying to mock him with it when she uses it.

Rhys double checks the protection spells as he takes a turn about the room. He can't tell her everything, and as much as he despises that this makes him like Tamlin in her mind, he'll keep those secrets.

But maybe there's something else he can tell her.

He presses a strand of power into the wards around this suite and threads it through, eyes closed. "The High Lord in the Night Court is chosen through a contest of power."

Feyre plays with a moonstone as she sits in a chair by the writing desk. "I thought it was always through family lines."

"It depends. Often, the line isn't the worst way to gauge power. After all, two powerful fae will often produce a powerful offspring, though it's not always the case. The Night Court is used to," he snaps off the end of the magic and tucks it into the warding spell, "testing its rulers, especially those it doubts."

Her brow furrows, like she's not sure if he's giving her a history lesson or reveal something he shouldn't about his position in the Court. "So the Boge, all that-"

He yawns, unable to prevent it, hoping she won't notice. "I have been mostly gone for fifty years, Feyre darling. Sometimes I was able to return to my Court, but Amarantha deliberately kept my leash short."

"So why are you doing this?" Feyre sets the moonstone down with a snap, nervous she cracked it or damaged the desk but too angry to let it overwhelm her. "Why even bother training me? Surely you can't get that much enjoyment from playing around in my head."

She says it like she means for it to cut him, and it does, but not because he feels guilty about taking time away from his other duties. It gets to him because he doesn't entirely have the answer himself.

The best he can think is that it's because they were both there when it got bad, and she's the only person he can think of who still wakes up like he does, wondering if it's really over.

"Someone's got to teach you about what you are." He says as blandly as he can, picking up the stone and flipping it over his knuckles. "And since no one else seems willing or able to step up to the task, you have me for your teacher. Get some rest and we'll work more on defending yourself tomorrow."

He puts the stone down, still warm from her touch. There was a small part of him that hoped she'd insist on his bringing the fable book with to her like she did yesterday, but she doesn't. Just turns as he fades back into shadow and winnows out, to make sure he's really gone.

And Rhys leaves, even though he knows she won't sleep. He's careful about what the bond shows her from his side: it's easy to make sure that no strong emotions go through; those are tall ships that aren't hard to blockade. It's the subtler things he worries about, the tiny, fast comets puncturing his atmosphere of control, the weariness in him as he makes his way back down to the throne room, how everything aches, and then the quiet blaze of accomplishment when he's faced with opponents he finally can defeat.

-o-

Later that night, he rests his elbows against the basin of the sink, head in his hands.

There is blood and bone in his hair, snapped wing membrane matted to his shirt, and he's got to wash it out.

This is his life now, tearing fae who once begrudgingly accepted his rule to pieces. This is what he has become. And sometimes it's so close to the person he had to be when he was with Amarantha that he has to check his own wings for ash or broken spots, even though he knows there will be none. The dirty clothes are handed to servants or burnt, he bandages his cuts, and tells himself that where he is is better than where he was.

There are stirring of rumor of Hybern learning about Amarantha's death, and Rhys knows that continent well enough to augur what that will mean. War is coming, and none of them in Prythian are prepared for it.

Azriel passes him secrets whenever his own spies uncover anything, and Rhys draws up battle plans. He'll have to do it again, cut off his starlit city from the world- it's not like they really got used to trading with people outside the wards again. Keep them all in an uneasy lockdown until all this is over, until he could guarantee that they'd be untouched.

Under the Mountain, at least, he could talk to her about what was happening. He could pretend he just had one Court and that it was all that worried him. But now, it's complicated. Now, he wishes he could tell her everything. And now, with her in the Spring Court and Tamlin holding an uneasy truce, they might as well be enemies.

Rhys runs water over his face, over his hair, lets the debris from tonight's battles run into the basin, then stares at himself in the mirror too long until someone else's eyes stare back.

-o-

"This might be easier," Feyre says, rubbing her temples the next day, "if I could practice on someone other than you."

They're in the study again, and the afternoon light is coming in from the highest windows. Rhys waves off her suggestion and stifles another yawn. He's not thrilled about it always having to be this way either, always being so tired but always having to be on guard, but here they are. Night Court challengers only come out at night, and he'll answer them with sneers and seething talons for as long as he has to.

It's just being awake during the day afterward to be with Feyre that makes it tricky.

And the thing is that she's made good progress today. Her shield is more solid and blocks the most basic attempts to enter her mind. She's good at concentrating and guarding things, and he's not surprised by that.

It'll take more time for her to keep it up under assault, or block more sophisticated attacks, but it's a start.

He ticks off the reasons on his hand. "One, you should be grateful have secured me for your tutor. There are faeries in this court who would quite literally give several body parts not fit to be mentioned in polite conversation for this."

Feyre shakes her head like that's a joke.

"Two, because we don't want anyone knowing what the full extent of your ability is. You haven't been in the Night Court terribly long," Rhys tucks a page from the budget back into place, "but we're actually very cutthroat and ruthless."

"No, really?" Feyre says.

"Three, despite your admirable stab at humor there, you are still unskilled." Rhys holds up his hands to deflect the inevitable objection. "I wish I could say I meant this in a kind and deprecating way, but I don't. Your attempts to shield, while more effective than they were yesterday, remain fairly haphazard. On the flip side, your attacks are crude enough that if I were to allow you to practice with someone less practiced than I was, you'd run a significant chance of causing them permanent brain damage or killing them slowly and painfully."

He takes a sip of the rose hip tea. The cup is see-through, carved glass the color of sunset, and it changes hues when the light hits it. "Happily, you can at least practice shielding on your own when you're back at the Spring Court. The other, we can do now."

Feyre taps her fingers on the table. "Am I really such a danger to your servants that you wouldn't let me practice with them?"

Rhys sets the cup back down. "Try breaking into my mind without hacking at my shield like a machete and I'll tell you."

She gives him a look.

"Feyre darling," he says, "do you suppose you are the only one who went Under the Mountain to save someone? Please, do me the honor of not discounting me entirely."

"Who was it?" She asks, and she's more alive in this moment than he's seen her in days. "I didn't think there was anyone you'd save."

"Who else?" He extends an arm behind them, encompassing the palace beyond. "My Court may be terrible, but that doesn't stop them from being mine."

They work for a while, Feyre trying to break into his head again, this time with permission, and he fends her off as he reads through budgets from twenty years ago. The accounting fae who kept the books were frightfully dull, though Mor's said that something was off in this particular year. She has a few ideas on who could be messing with the books, but she wanted a second opinion before coming down on them in full-blown fury mode.

So here he is, nose-deep in dusty records.

"You have been reading that page for the last fifteen minutes." Feyre says after another unsuccessful, but less disastrous attempt.

"It," Rhys sniffs, "is a very dense page."

And the last reason, the one that he doesn't tell her, is that it's kind of nice having someone around who he can snap at on the regular who doesn't cringe and hustle away or desire to kill him. His Inner Circle fills that role nicely when he's in Velaris, but down here, it's just him. Even his allies have to be pretending to subvert him for the Nightmare Court to take them seriously.

Maybe it's because he finally feels a little more evenly matched in her that the rest of being back here and sorting out this mess that his court has become hurts less. You always expect it to go to hell when you leave, but it's the coming back and rebuilding that gets you, the stuff you don't anticipate hurting you that does. And truthfully, Amren and Mor have done a good job. Yes, there's someone stealing from the treasury, but there's always someone stealing from the treasury before he kills them.

They switch between mental barriers and reading when Feyre gets tired and it's almost like she's just a houseguest, if things like that existed in this place, if people actually visited the Nightmare Court for pleasure and not because they wanted something.

And it's almost something he doesn't want to end.

So, later that evening, he stands up and holds a hand out to her. "Come on," Rhys says, "and I'll show you something I've been hiding."

The bond between them is a crackle of electricity, and sometimes once it's been tamped down long enough with their shields and walls that when it they let down their barriers it spreads through the space between them like a lightning storm. He is acutely aware of the way her body navigates the halls behind him, how she traces the flick of his cape as he walks with her eyes.

How she does not want to be watching him like this, and reminds herself of Tamlin, and of the fact that she only has four more days to last this out before she can go back and stop worrying that she's betraying everyone.

When they reach the top of the mountain, her anxiety prickles through the air around him, paprika scattered like caltrops. He laughs. "What?"

"How do you always do that?" Feyre's nervousness tips over some unseen ledge into anger, edged with glittery flakes. "Are you reading my mind without telling me all the time or am I just that obvious?"

There is really no good way to explain this. And his hesitation must show for a second, because she sees it.

"And what," she thrust her arm forward, palm up with the tattoo gleaming through the night, "is this? You said it was a bargain. What exactly does that mean?"

The eye tries very hard not too move under their scrutiny but it blinks once, miserably. Feyre slaps it.

Rhys runs a hand through his hair. He'd wanted to show her something beautiful about his Court, not dissect what ties them together. What comes dangerously close to the other bond they share. "Remember how I explained earlier that Night magic is primarily things like this, shields, emotional magic?"

"You cast a spell on me?"

"You gave me permission." He holds up his hands. "I didn't exactly have a lot of options left when I came to you down in the dungeons."

"You still didn't have to invade my head to save me!"

"I did the only thing I could do to keep you alive." Rhys cuts in, too sharp. "And to keep me alive as well. What? Did you think Amarantha would treat me kindly once she found out about it, if she hadn't thought I was using you for worse purposes than I was? That mark has prevented more than just your death."

Feyre looks like she's going to be sick, but internally he sees her making sense of it. Understanding, even if it's something she doesn't like. "You're always playing both ends against the middle to get what you want."

Rhys bows. "I am a product of my environment."

"You're awful."

"I know. You'd think it would get tiring for me to be this charming all the time, but no, against all odds I preserve." He swings around. "Now, we have sights to see."

She makes a noise that sounds suspiciously like a laugh, but then something in her wavers and she sinks to the floor on the staircase. And just like that, he knows it's over. There are silences, tepid politeness that take him hours to break through, and as much as he struggles to, she keeps shutting him out.

"Feyre?" Rhys should not be letting this much concern into his voice. Not when they're in this Court, when other things can hear him acting like anything other than a playboy with a taste for sharp things. Mor was right, he was stupid to think he could keep her here without consequences-

"I," she says, taking a breath, "just want to go back to my room. No sightseeing. If that's all right."

"That's fine." He kneels down beside her, even though he knows she won't want his help in getting back up.

"Is it?" Feyre's eyes slip past him, into another room, another space, like she's someone else talking to someone else.

-o-

And so that's how it ends. She doesn't go with him to see the night sky all lit up in the darkness, doesn't leave her room, and even though Mor says it's easier guarding her like this, Rhys knows his Third is worried as well.

She pages through the fable book from dawn to dusk, the shadows filter through the walls to bring her food, ask her if she wants to see the balconies again, but she always tells them no.

Sometimes it seems so easy to pretend like nothing happened, like they're the people they were Under the Mountain when there was no Tamlin tearing apart all the Courts to get her back. But without a threat like Amarantha breathing down their necks, what is she to Rhys and he to her? Feyre sleeps for hours and hours and nightmares still come back to claim her before she wakes.

-o-

The week passes. There is no more reading, no more fights in libraries, and no more of her watching the sky with her mouth open, stars reflected in her eyes. She stays in her room until the days are up and it's time for her to go back.

And he does returns her to the Spring Court, because a bargain's a bargain and he doesn't go back on his deals, even though he could pull an Amarantha and say that he's changing terms on her, that Feyre didn't nail him down as well as she should have known to while she was bleeding out. He does it less because he's her mate and more because they've both been in enough terrible bargains to last a lifetime.

He takes her back in grand style, winnowing them right past all of Tamlin's useless wards (keep the High Lord of Night Court out, good luck) so that Feyre won't even have to walk that far.

"Well, Feyre darling, I suppose you're back where you belong now." He smirks at a Spring Court fae who has just broken several dishes and a vase in her haste to run off and, no doubt, summon Tamlin. "Miss it?"

She doesn't say anything, but something in her face shifts at those words, like he's said exactly the wrong thing. The bond pulls them closer and he sees wedding dress fittings, constantly being trailed by a High Priestess eager to put the next generation of the Spring Court in her power, and Feyre sitting alone in her room because no one will let her out of the manor house, no matter how much she begs or schemes.

He pulls back, suddenly needing to put distance between them.

"You don't have to do this." Rhys says, and part of him is surprised by the undercurrent of a threat in his voice. "You can walk away."

She rounds on him as the sounds from within the house rise to clamor. "Oh, really? I can just run away from all this, strike out on my own?"

"If you wanted."

"Where would I go? I'm not human anymore, I can't go back to my sisters or my father if I wanted to. I'm High Fae, and I don't belong to any Court. I don't belong anywhere." She laughs, bitter. "Running away, that would be stupid. Tamlin won't let...Ianthe needs me to coordinate lunch parties and get things together for the ceremony. Besides, I'm the only one who can keep Tam calm. And on top of that, all the other Courts want me for reasons of their own. At least here I'm safe."

Because they've told her that so often she believes it even though she knows it's a lie. His hands clench into fists at his sides.

Because she will be safe if she stays here. Tamlin will protect her for the rest of his life, and once they're wed no one will touch Feyre for fear of him. She'll lead a life without danger, without always chasing after the edge of darkness, without risking everything she has to make things work out all right.

Rhys exhales. It should be enough, that she did it all once for them, put herself in mortal danger, actually died, even, to break the curse. And a part of him understands: some nights he wakes up in the dead of night so tired and beaten down that he flies to his townhouse in Velaris just because he needs the lights of the artists' quarter to keep him company through the darkness.

The cost of saving other people is messing yourself up, and he can't really fault her for deciding she's done with it.

He just-

He thought it would be different.

"You can always call for me, you know." Rhys says it cavalierly, calling threads of shadow to lick along his shoulders as more Spring Court fae fill the hall. Still no Tamlin. "If ever you feel like ticking Tamlin off here and there, I've been told I'm incredibly effective. And for you, I'll always be able to pencil in some time between rebuilding my Court if it means making his life more difficult."

A ghost of a smile curls around her lips. "I don't think he'd appreciate that."

Rhys bows and places one hand over his heart. "That, Feyre darling, is precisely the point."

He can almost swear that she's about to laugh, but then there's a roar that nearly shatters glass across the hallway, and Tamlin rushes toward them in a sprint. Time's up.

"Until next month, then." Rhys inclines his head again, and winnows out slowly, just enough to make Tamlin think that he can still rend him to pieces if he leaps at the last moment. Just before Rhys vanishes, he winks and Feyre's wide eyes are the last things he sees before Tamlin crashes to the floor.

And it shouldn't make Rhys happy to hurt the person she loves, but it does, probably because she didn't seem all that happy there anyway.


	11. white roses, red roses

And he's right, she's not.

They both know it, he and Feyre, but neither can do anything about it. The eye on her palm shows him the preparations: Spring Court fae trimming hedges into amusing and fanciful shapes, bolts of cloth for awnings and overhangs, food and cakes churned out by the kitchens for taste-testing before they're made en masse for the ceremony. It's all pomp and ostentatious ritual, one more easy way for the Tamlin's Court to solidify its power after being scattered and trapped Under the Mountain for so long.

On the surface, it's expected. Go a layer deeper and it's petty.

Tamlin's told her all those pretty stories about mating bonds and marrying your true love, how it would happen soon, just give it time, that one day they'd look into each other's eyes and something would snap into place.

And it won't. Rhys has definitive evidence that this is never going to happen. But how much worse is it to tell her versus letting her take centuries (and it would be centuries) to figure that out?

It's her choice, he tells himself. She wants this.

He stuffs his hands in his long jacket pockets and gets back to work. Work, which tonight involves a trip through the arts district.

It's a week before Feyre's wedding and restoration efforts in the Night Court have proceeded smoothly: Mor has unearthed several vexing problems in the Court of Nightmares which he's almost certain that she's waited to tell him about until he's so exhausted from watching Feyre that they come as relief, Amren is evaluating the effort needed to reopen Velaris' borders, and the rest of his Inner Circle, though Azriel and Cassian don't know the precise reason why he tears through the sky at sunset sometimes, they still sense that something's wrong.

He strides through his starry city and wonders if it's ever going to get better.

"Another rough night?" Cassian says when they reach the playhouse. Rhys shoots him a look and the other Illyrian holds up both hands in surrender. "Hey, I'm just saying, these people expect aloof-but-witty, patron-of-the-arts Rhys. Not rip-you-to-ribbons Rhys. I realize there are some extenuating circumstances like, you know, being trapped for fifty years, but don't lose the sangfroid."

"Well," Rhys says dryly, "I know I've truly reached new lows when you advise me on sangfroid."

"That's the spirit." Cassian gives him a thumbs up and they enter the theatre together.

It's so different here and it keeps startling him. Fifty years shouldn't be enough to make him so surprised that he can sit in a plush seat, adorned with gilded armrests and ridiculous tassels, and that other fae will all gather and sit quietly without howling for blood or turning minor slights into blood feuds, but it is. They all retract their claws here for the sake of something better, something frailer than their feral natures would have permitted, if they were in other courts.

The theatre's manager traditionally keeps a box free to thank him for his protection and assistance in keeping the productions going. It's not inexpensive running a city of the arts, but Velaris at this point mostly sustains itself, with a little help here and there from programs that Rhys and his family set up. Sometimes even the safeguards don't work as times change and leaders shift (his first twenty years of trying to manage two courts at once was a delightful chain of catastrophes) but now things have steadied.

And on the whole, it's good. Fae have studios and classes they can attend to pursue their craft and become new masters, and they'll have lifetimes of music, art, and culture to share with the world if it's ever safe enough to open the city again.

The world just hasn't been very reliable at keeping things safe lately.

The play begins, actors sweep onto the stage and present the opening scene, a swordfight. Blades dance and faeries slip through their lines and roles as easily as clouds hustling over the night sky. And though the bond still prickles at the back of his neck, for a few hours, he forgets.

It just always comes back, and for the first time in his life he's had to admit that he's trapped himself more surely than he's trapped his opponent. The bond draws them close, but it's only him who sees Feyre kissing Tamlin, Tamlin surrounding her with wildflowers and twirling her emerald ring around her finger before laying her down among stems and bluebells. Rhys shields her from his worst parts, and he knows that she's still working on it, doesn't know to keep it up under pressure like he does, but nights like this knowing that doesn't help.

Rhys flies from Velaris to the Nightmare Court and after a few perfunctory and dismissive words to Keir, a trio of captured faeries from Hybern are brought forward. Talons snick out from his hands in dagger-shadows. Good. He's not in the mood for masks and artifice tonight.

It's less that she doesn't know how unhappy she is, and more that she'd rather have the unhappiness, the constant stifling of a lifetime of banquets and decoration than try to fight.

He thought she was like him. He thought she understood what it was to be beaten down but have to keep going even if it tears you apart when he made that deal with her in the prison cell, then when she died and he didn't, and then when he felt that strange gravity that sealed his fate before he left for the Night Court.

He thought he wasn't alone.

But that's exactly what he is, because Feyre never calls for him. She never wonders why he doesn't summon her again after the last time. She doesn't talk to the eye on her hand like she did between Amaratha's trials. She just sits through her High Priestess' ministrations and quiet corrections of her speech, her wardrobe, and her manner like this is what she wants.

Because maybe, he has to tell himself, it is what she wants. A nice marriage, a calm life as an ornament. And for a moment, Rhys can't see straight.

He rips through body after body, blood pounding in his ears. His terrible, ruthless court claps and cheers as their High Lord pries minds apart and severs bone from flesh like it's their favorite sport. It probably is. He is hollow and cold and utterly void of mercy, and when it's over Rhys doesn't even know how hurt he is.

He does this night after night until Keir cannot find more spies for him to break, because at the end of every fight his limbs tremble but his mind is, finally, mercifully, silent.

Because it's only when he can't feel anything that he's okay.

-o-

The darkness finds him, as it always does.

Before Amarantha, before the caverns and abysses of his mountain made him scan them twice for monsters and her ever-searching eyes, he used to like this: how the night sky was so wide that he couldn't see its boundaries, being so close to the heavens he could disappear into them and the people on the ground wouldn't be able to tell him apart from the stars.

But all the things he loves are weapons, and some nights the fine difference between loving something and wanting to be destroyed is too much for his subconscious mind to remember. Dreams of wide black sky pinpricked with distant suns morph into blindfolds and tons of rock overhead. His breath comes shorter even as he tries to remember what his captor knows and what she doesn't, tells himself that he'll get out of this again.

Sometimes he forgets the precise shade of her hair, sometimes in the shadows it looks more russet than red, and sometimes the tilt of her nose is wrong. The details smudge, but there is one thing he never forgets and that is her voice.

"Rhysand," Amarantha whispers into the ragged, bloody shell of his ear, "when will you realize that you've lost?"

This is what losing looks like: stuck with her forever, all his curses unbroken, and a city sealed off from him for all eternity. His knees give out first when she strokes a finger down his chest and he knows she sees him shiver before she reaches into his chest and pulls out his still-beating heart.

Rhys wakes up to blackness darker than night, shadows clinging to him in a whirl of static and ash, blocking out the moon.

Gods and every damned eddy of the Cauldron, this again.

He sits in the center of the maelstorm with his head in his hands, everything quiet, steadies his breathing, then picks out shadows one by one and disperses them. As shadows vanish, the sky passes from midnight blue to predawn purple and ash. When they're gone, he stands and puts on a tunic and pants.

It's easy to wonder if it's worth it, coming back this wounded and wrecked, attempting to be the person he was before.

His wings take him to the roof of the House of the Wind, the highest point for miles around. Below him, Velaris glimmers like the earthbound twin of the galaxies overhead. Behind him, the sky turns to silvery lilac and then to pinks and golds and the stars dim and pass to other, unseen horizons.

He has taken a lot from a lot of people. It's part of his job, being the High Lord of the Night Court, stealing and double-crossing to achieve his own ends. It would easy to take Feyre too, to spirit her away and call in his claim like the cold-blooded bastard she's no doubt been assured he is. It would be very easy to keep her and not let go.

A cool dawn wind flutters through his clothes as the evening lights go out in the city below him. Rhys pulls his knees to his chest and lets the morning dew cover him. He's survived losing Velaris, and he'll survive losing her.

Something dark and twisted scrapes at the edges of his mind again and he tsks, reaching down the bond and intercepting another nightmare from Feyre. Smoky tendrils writhe from his closed fist and dissolve into the morning, harmless.

Sometimes loving something means cutting yourself out of it, no matter how much it hurts.

-o-

In another place, a day before her marriage, a sleeping girl who is not quite mortal but not sure how to be immortal curls into her bed. Her brow is still furrowed, but her breathing evens out and her shoulders relax.

And it's not perfect, but it's enough.

-o-

The day of the wedding he resolves to get roaring drunk.

It's not as easy as it seems. He can't concentrate in any of his meetings and has to cancel them, vision constantly in double-focus: half of him numb and dead-eyed in his townhouse or in the city, half of him in dressing rooms and mirrors, caught up in tulle and lace and clusters of ivory roses. Cassian catches him by the arm when Feyre's side of things goes black and has to ask Rhys if he's okay.

She put on a glove. Rhys steadies himself against his friend and then heads off down the hall. He knows Cassian's asked another question, but he doesn't hear it.

She put on a glove to hide the tattoo. She doesn't want anyone to know about him or their bargain. She's really going to do it.

It was a stupid wish, and he knows it, to hope that the undercurrent of unease he'd felt in her would morph into action. And if he's not too proud to be honest with himself: ever since the date for her wedding to Tamlin had been fixed, he'd nurtured a quiet fantasy of Feyre getting fed up with Ianthe, kicking over a flower basket and escaping on horseback. Rhys, of course, would sweep in with some witty one-liner and his cloak unfurling behind him like a scythe, both of which Feyre would be too angry to appreciate, but she'd take him up on his offer to take her somewhere Tamlin wouldn't find her.

He locks the door to his study and sets out a curving bottle of a fine liqueur and a glass tumbler. His hands, always elegant and controlled, tremble.

He hadn't expected it to start this early.

At the beginning of today, Rhys had planned on burning himself out on work and then allowing himself to be dragged to the swimming lights of the entertainment district and plied with shot after shot until he couldn't hear the I do's and eternal promises whispered along the bond in the back of his head. Until he was so caught up in the silver tang of faeries dancing, in loud music and strands of anticipation threaded through night spots that he stopped looking for two other bodies in the dark.

It makes a disastrous kind of sense that this is happening now. They want to take advantage of the nice early spring weather, the gentle breezes scattering blossoms and tousling her hair. It's a calculated sort of scheme that he can appreciate, even as it undoes him.

He steadies his hand and pours a fairly liberal amount of alcohol into the crystal tumbler. She's made her choice, and it was Tamlin. Not everyone marries their mate. That's all.

The liquid shivers as he picks the tumbler up and he has to set it down again and remind himself to breathe. He's not sure he can do this sober, but he doesn't want to knock himself out for it either. It's disingenuous, the coward's way out. And he's survived so many things to fall apart now. Rhys runs a hand through his hair, stands, and takes a slow sip of the liqueur.

It burns a little, but what doesn't? He has his city back. It's safe. His friends made it through fifty years without him and even Prythian and the Nightmare Court have mostly come out of it okay. That's enough. He never expected to be happy- those stories belonged to the people who weren't quite so ruthless, weren't so very willing to make others miserable to get what they wanted.

He knew that he would not end happily, but it still hurts, each flicker of Feyre's nerves as she's lead through the house and down into the temple gardens where her beloved waits for her.

In a single fluid motion, Rhys empties the glass. One down. However many more to go, he's not sure. He's never been a proponent of losing control, but there's a first time for everything. He supposes, as he measures out a few more fingers of liqueur, that this is a good learning experience. Lessons in contained implosion, how to fall apart as quickly and conveniently as possible.

He coughs on the second glass, because this liqueur is actually vile to drink straight, and he can't finish it. No matter. His study is well-stocked with faerie wines and spirits, and there's bound to be something palatable enough to send him into oblivion.

After all, he did this with Feyre Under the Mountain. Their positions were reversed, but it's not impossible to get a High Lord out of his mind.

But he lingers in memory too much- he doesn't go through glasses quickly enough- because he still feels the dread building in her gut when she enters the grounds and all the guests' eyes swing toward her. He feels how her slippershod feet recoil when the white rose petals give way to red, cutting a trail of blood to Tamlin on the dais, how Amarantha's spectre still haunts her.

Rhys lays his forehead against the wall, tumbler forgotten on the table, and closes his eyes. If he were truly charitable, he'd send calmness down the bond willing her to keep going and be happy. But he's not a charitable person that way or really any way, and maybe that's why he's always the villain.

Still, Feyre keeps walking even though her mind screams at her not to. When she stops and Tamlin asks her what's wrong, the hopelessness hits him at the same time it does her: how she pleads silently with Ianthe to help her, get her out of this before she vomits over the cloud of crimson at her feet, and finds nothing.

Rhys hands curl into fists. He shouldn't do this. He cannot do this. He has to stay here or he'll risk more than just himself, he could endanger his Court-

Feyre looks to Tamlin and wills him to understand. Their bond is drawn so tight that for a moment Rhys isn't in the study but in garden, feeling his own heart stutter alongside hers. Tamlin waits and does nothing and Feyre's breathing comes shorter and shorter like a snared rabbit.

She doesn't want to do this and no one is helping her. Rhys tries to take a deep breath, steady himself and force himself back into his own head, but Feyre's emotions come at him too fast, too raw. She's really, truly alone, and her despair and frantic heartbeat pound through ever fiber of his being: _get me out, get me out, get me out._

Something in him gives, snaps, and he steps through shadow.

-o-

"Hello, Feyre darling." Rhys says and flourishes out a bow. He's played this part a thousand times in his head, he knows exactly how he looks, the charcoal-jacketed stranger with ribbons of darkness cresting off him and a smirk twisting up a corner of his mouth. The other High Lord, the one who is not the groom, was not invited, and has not had this many people glaring at him since he was Under the Mountain.

In short, the villain of the piece.

"I've come to collect," Rhys says, mostly to Feyre but also to the gathered wedding guests. "I hope this isn't an inconvenient time."

Feyre is a thin girl in a cloud of a dress that's too wide, too showy, too impractical for him to believe she chose it herself. Her eyes cut into him with shock and then with anger, and she finally looks like what she is, a knife in a bouquet. Tamlin and Lucien seem at a loss, but that's fairly usual. There's a shiver of on Feyre's end of the bond, one type of dread exchanged for another. Rhys' eyes narrow. Fear, really?

At least this'll make it convincing.

"Come along," he says to her. "I have other things to take care of besides you today."

She's looking at him like she does not believe him. Like he hasn't left her along for a little over a month since the last time they saw each other. Like this wasn't precisely what would happen when she called for him.

Like she's expected he too would hear her and offer nothing in return.

"Please don't." She says, too quiet.

He keeps the claws of his talons invisible, but looking out at all these faeries and knowing that they would have watched Feyre walk to her doom and do nothing to help her makes him want to forget that he's not here to start a war.

"We have a bargain, in case you've forgotten." Rhys picks a nonexistent piece of lint from his jacket sleeve. He does this infuriatingly slowly, as though he doesn't realize that they're all waiting on him. "I've been awfully charitable allowing you to stay here for so long, but even my patience has its limits. You've shirked your responsibility to me long enough."

"You can't take her. Not now." Tamlin strides down from the dais, all greens and golds and flowers turning toward him as he moves. This is the High Lord of the Spring Court with all his power back, and even though Rhys may have more tricks up his sleeve and is more than willing to use them, Tamlin's no pushover. He tore Amarantha apart himself, and it's no comfort to remember what those swiftly flexing hands are capable of.

Rhys raises one eyebrow coolly. "I don't recall bargaining with you, Spring Lord."

"Hasn't she given you enough?" Tamlin says in an odd voice. It almost makes Rhys break character, the sudden rawness of it. "She was your plaything Under the Mountain and now you want to ruin the happiest day of her life."

Feyre's mouth opens and closes like she wants to object to something in that but Rhys can't tell what. Rhys' stomach turns. Has he really ruined something she wanted? Surely he would have felt something through the bond, she wouldn't have shielded-no, he cannot let himself think about that. She was calling for help, for anyone to help. And he may not be able to do much, but he can do this.

Rhys loops an arm around her waist, in between ridiculous frills and confections of lace, and smiles. "You know me, always coming in at the worst times, implacable as always."

"What do you want." Tamlin doesn't say it like a question. It's more a string of single syllables said monotone, words gritted out as though each costs him something dear. "Tell me what you want for her."

"Nothing." Rhys draws Feyre closer and is rewarded with bared teeth from Tamlin. She's warm against his side but she doesn't pull away, and the fact of this spikes his grin. "Believe me, I have everything I want."

That's what makes him dangerous, not the way the darkness curls over them, how he folds himself and Feyre between places as easy as blinking, how he's the most powerful of all the High Lords.

He's dangerous because there are no pieces left on the board for Tamlin to bargain with, not gold or jewels or power, no place he'd rather be and nothing he'd want more than this: to be the one with a dark smile and an arm around Feyre as her fiance sputters and wedding guests clamor toward them, cursing how calculating and cold he is, trying to catch them before he winks and they vanish.

* * *

 **Author's Note:** As soon as I read this scene in ACOMAF, I knew I wanted to do it from Rhys' POV. I wrote this listening to Hayden Calnin's "Coward" on repeat, if anybody out there wants a little peak behind the scenes and into my process. Anyway, tell me what you guys think! I'm excited to bring more of the Inner Circle in in the next chapter (hilarious shenanigans are about to go down).

 _Missawesome03:_ Haha, yeah! I know I take ages sometimes with school and stuff, but it's always so nice that everyone's really excited when I post. And thanks! As a giant Rhys fangirl, I can't resist having him make Tamlin's life horrible from time to time (I am the worst, I know, but at least ACOMAF gives me plenty of opportunity to do that).

 _Guest 8/30:_ Thank you so much, that means a lot! Sometimes I think I have the weirdest style in the world, so hearing this makes me really happy.

 _Guest 8/25:_ Thanks! I'm going to try to keep this a little more regular now that I'm not working over the summer as much (I did outline the whole arc for this, I swear!) so we'll see how it goes!

Thanks as always for all the great reviews! You guys really do make my day.

-cy.


	12. spirited away

They materialize again in the halls of the Night Court, in the corridor of Rhys' suites in the Hewn City, shadows falling from them like mist. He gently unwinds his arm from around her waist and straightens his jacket. His side feels oddly vacant without her pressed so close, empty. Rhys tries not to think about that too much. Instead, he schools his features into a smirk. "Feel free to thank me whenever you like."

It's all masks here, determining what someone expects to see and then playing a part.

"Thank you?" Feyre repeats, still bristling in that terrible flower cloud of a dress. Feyre expects an asshole, a dashing rogue who is ultimately out for his own ends, someone who screws people over just because it amuses him. So, fine, he can give that to her. She tries to advance on him but it's so hard to walk in that she can only manage small steps. "Why should I thank you? Take me back right now."

He slips into the persona as easily as mist over mountains.

"No." Rhys says, leaning against the wall, bored. "And you should be thanking me is because you didn't want to be there."

She stomps her foot. "The whole point is that I do want to be there."

He's so tired of this, of the helplessness and the panic, but most of all of the lying to herself. He feels darkness condensing around him and has to dispel it, keep it under control. And there is a not small part of him that wants to push her to her breaking point, not because she needs to get angry at someone, though she does, but because he just wants to see her mad again.

To see her as anything other than broken down and defeated.

"No, you didn't, and you know it." His voice goes low and he moves closer, predator scenting prey. "You were calling for someone, anyone, to help you because you were scared out of your mind. Don't deny it, not when you were the one who begged me to come."

Her eyes widen for a moment before her own anger pushes past the veil of fear. "How did you know about that?" She says in a dark and level voice. "What exactly did you do to me?"

"Nothing you didn't agree to." Rhys takes her hand with the tattoo on it and turns it palm up. Not roughly, but not gently either. "What did you think this meant? That I wouldn't have the pleasure of hearing you in my head whether I wanted it or not? That if you got careless or forgot to shield I wouldn't be treated to an endless parade of your thoughts?"

And he sees it happen, the second when Feyre realizes that he's been quietly present in the background of her thoughts this whole time, someone looking over a shoulder. He feels the moment she raises her shields, determined to cut him off and cut him out. Good, let her do it. It's not like he wants this all the time, a constant fogged connection whose volume turns up whenever she gets tired. He's actually sort of proud: she's gotten better at shielding than she used to be.

"So that was you," she says. "You never told me."

"You never asked. I figured you'd worked it out considering how much I'd been pushing you to shield." He releases her hand, but it's more like Feyre rips it out of his grasp. He tsks. "Yes, months later, now the bargain's terrible."

It's not how he wanted her to find out. He'd much rather that she came into the knowledge on her own, slowly, but that's what he gets for not explaining everything up front.

He hopes she does not find out about the other side of their bond for a long, long time.

"Is this what it's always like with bargains in your Court?" When she moves, the dress swishes like it's trying to shush them. "All tattoos and assholes?"

Rhys flicks a hand through the air nonchalantly. "All promises are binding. The way they manifest differs depending on what's agreed upon and what the parties making the bargain require. That you wound up with the best asshole of all them is your good fortune."

Her lip curls up like she's utterly disgusted. "Why don't you end this?"

"Because I'm heartless, remember?" He wants to laugh, because really this is one of the most stupid things he's done in a while, stealing her from Tamlin, right at the wedding, like that's not going to be a problem later. But as much of an edge he walks now between cool reserve and slashes of emotion he hopes she doesn't see, he doesn't want this to stop. This is the most animated he's seen Feyre in weeks, and something in him burns a little faster when she looks at him like this.

Like it's back to how it used to be, two enemies working together, them against the world.

It's not the same when his Inner Circle riffs off of him, he can't make the same kind of jokes around them that he used to in some ways, can't bring up Under the Mountain or say "at least it's not Amarantha" without all his best friends falling silent, angry at their own inability to save him.

He wants to tell them that it's fine. It wasn't like he could even save himself.

"Take me back right now. I'm not kidding." Feyre's hands fist up into her dress, crinkling layers of white froth. "I have to go back."

"In a week, as per the terms of our bargain." Rhys turns and gives her a jaunty wave. "In the meantime, I'm sure true love will survive somehow."

Sometimes it's easier blaming someone else instead of asking yourself the hard questions. Sometimes it's easier to pretend that there's a simple solution to a problem, that she's only here because Rhysand, High Lord of the Night Court, is just that much of an asshole.

And all right, maybe he is. But he won't let the person who saved him destroy herself.

In a split-second, the way she can't stand him spikes into him so strongly that he doesn't pick up on her resolve or, more relevantly, on the grab and quick flick of her wrist, until her slipper hits him in right in the back of his head.

"What-" Rhys whirls around, all bared teeth and jagged edges of shadow. "Did you- did you just throw a shoe at me?"

Feyre hikes her dress up to remove the other slipper. Her rage ripples off her in waves, her eyes like fire, and his heart clocks a little faster. This is what he's missed, this all-consuming burn, her determination to do the impossible because someone she cared about was hurt.

And as much as he hates it, Rhys is always going to be jealous of Tamlin, that Tamlin was the one Feyre went Under the Mountain for, gave up so much because of.

Because that kind of sacrifice is something that Rhys knows too well. And it's not something that should be placed on a high shelf or that the recipient should feel ashamed of and hide away.

It's proof of wanting something badly. And he has wanted so many things so, so badly.

"I dare you." Rhys says, voice barely more than a breath. For a moment, he and Feyre face each other, two storm systems over a plain, him cool and collected as ice, her low thunder and peals of ash, before they collide. He winks and she throws the second slipper at him.

It's going pretty fast, actually. Faster than a mortal could throw, faster than Feyre could think it through and regret it, and he tastes the tang of hatred and frustration and savors it as he catches the slipper, effortlessly this time.

Rhys forces himself to keep a straight face. She's getting good.

"If you want to train with me that badly, all you had to do was ask, Feyre darling." Rhys summons a lick of flame and takes his time incinerating her beribboned slipper right in front of her for the sheer pleasure of watching her seethe. "Just remember who you're dealing with."

And remember how much better it felt being angry instead of scared, he wants to say, but doesn't.

-o-

They train on and off, mostly off. Feyre spends her time lying on her bed in her room. She's gotten thinner, which should not be a surprise but still shocks him when the outline of a bone shows too clearly under her neck or arm. She hardly comes out to eat or touches the food that he has Nuala and Cerridwen set out for her each day. Thoughts prowl through her mind like animals stalking the periphery of a forest, but she keeps her shield raised.

For the bulk of the week, he fills his time with meetings and planning sessions, pouring over the latest reports from Azriel's scouts from Hybern and setting up crisis management programs for faeries affected from their time Under the Mountain. Art therapy has seemed to be a popular option, and he, Mor, and Amren have been contacting local studios and theatres to see what services can be offered pro bono and what he might have to provide assistance with. He introduces Feyre to Mor, and that goes mostly well. Even though he tells Mor not to get too disappointed when Feyre doesn't call for her or ask to talk to her again, she does anyway.

But there's not much he can do. He won't force Feyre to attend parties or dinners or meetings if she doesn't want to, and when it comes down to it, if he were in the same situation, all he'd want would be being left alone with time to think.

So he gives her that, leaving books for her on her dresser and graduating her through his old fable collections up through more advanced children's book and even a shorter novel by the end of the week. Sometimes he selects books he thought were funny and some nights all she wants is escapism, and when he feels the stories unfolding in her head, her pitch into surprise as she figures out that she's read the whole book, all by herself, it's almost worth it.

After a week, she doesn't look that different. She eats, but not much, and the wan and haunted look hasn't faded from around her eyes.

And this is the terrible part, to know exactly what's wrong but not to be able to talk about it.

He returns Feyre as he's returned her before, and is pleased to discover that the wedding has been called off indefinitely. Things proceed as normal, or at least as normal as they can be when he steals her away every month.

Rhys is in a meeting when Tamlin gives Feyre a box of paints. He's trying to talk with Amren about defensive strategy and evacuation plans in the event of an attack (because both of them know that five thousand years of peace is just an invitation to misfortune at this point), idly trying not to wonder if he should have given Feyre art supplies instead of books, when it happens.

Tamlin crushes the paint box in his hands and suddenly everything from Feyre goes black.

Rhys is speaking but he forgets what the rest of his sentence is, just stands still, waiting for something, anything. Mor asks him if he's okay and he doesn't answer. When he feels along the edges of her consciousness and finds nothing, he's about half a minute away from tearing into the Spring Court and taking her, hell or high water, when he recognizes the darkness for what it is: a shield.

It makes him oddly sort of pleased, even though Amren and Azriel are staring at him like he's lost his mind. It's well constructed, adamantine black, solid through and through, built to keep things out.

And eventually the shield dissipates: in the later moments of the night, when Feyre can't quite keep it together and she goes over and over what happened, how Tamlin shattered the box, the paints, the easels, tore up the floor and flooded the air with splinters, and how she was safe, totally untouched thanks to her own powers.

Somewhere else, the tension leaves another High Lord's shoulders and he settles in to sleep.

-o-

And then, of course, Tamlin does something stupid.

She's been working through more books. Rhys can tell because sometimes when she's reading, she'll say the words in her head and concentrate so much that she'll let down her guard and accidentally share with him parts of the story she's working on. It's a good distraction sometimes, when the weight of his city presses a little too much into him, to hear her sound out "consternation" or "sleight" and see how, slowly, she gets better. She wouldn't even have tried those words before.

He'll hear part of a story and then it'll cut out all at once as she shields, and when he comes back to her the characters will have moved on. Other times, she'll slam her shields back up again so fast it takes him by surprise if he's only half-paying attention.

When he thinks of her practicing like this, he's not surprised that she can block him out here and there, that she was able to shield so strongly that for a few moments in that tense meeting when the paints shattered he felt nothing.

They fall into a rhythm after a while, sometimes being a part of her head and sometimes being apart. But then Tamlin packs up his garrison and announces that he's leaving on a patrol of the Spring Court lands, and everything changes.

It starts like it always starts, with Feyre asking for something.

She chases Tamlin through the manor house, telling him that he can't do this to her. She doesn't even put any effort into shielding she's so afraid, and Rhys can feel the pads of her feet hit the tiles, can feel how she slips around corners when Tamlin doesn't turn back around to face her, just assures her that she'll be fine, that this is the best thing possible for her. Rhys' own breathing tightens.

But Tamlin will not relent. This is nothing. She should stay and be safe.

Rhys puts his head in his hands. Tamlin was Under the Mountain for less than four months, and spent most of his time in great halls or guest suites. He did not spend it in prison cells or bedrooms much, not as much as they did. And he does not understand how locking all the doors and closing all the windows could be bad.

And what really gets Rhys, the part that makes him storm down the corridor in search of Amren and Mor, is that it's not even like Tamlin couldn't figure it out.

His Inner Circle was never Under the Mountain, and they'll never quite get everything he's gone through. That's fine. That's something Rhys expects, something he took onto himself when he realized what he'd have to do to keep this city safe. But when he says _leave a window open_ , asks someone to crack a door in a meeting room, or that he'd rather have this meeting on a terrace or on the roof than inside tonight, they may go quiet for a beat or two, but they do it.

They don't ask him why he suddenly requires this after fifty years away from them, they don't ask for all the gory details, for him to prove to them that something about it suffocates him. They just lift the sash or prop the door open.

Tamlin knew what was happening to her- it was, after all, not exactly secret where Feyre was confined or what she was made to do. Amarantha enjoyed the idea that her guests might take advantage of this knowledge to make Feyre's life even more miserable, and not a small number of them did (or tried to) before Rhys stepped in and scared them all off.

Rhys, not Tamlin.

At this point, not seeing what's happening to Feyre is blindness. Not even caring enough to wonder why she's reacting that way, as long as she's yours, that's possibly the worst thing to do to her, and Tamlin's doing it.

A shadow of wings cuts through the corridor behind him as he walks, the darkness shifting around even as he wills his magic down. Rhys has too much experience with people like that, one other person specifically, who acted and acted and never cared how it affected him, as long as he was hers. As long as she got what she wanted out of him.

It makes him sick.

Happily, Amren and Mor already waiting for him in the House of the Wind, where he'd summoned them. Mor has her game face and well-worn fighting leathers on and her eyes glitter, intense but excited. Amren is patently unimpressed.

"High Lord," she says in a voice that is every bit at odds with her small frame and never stops being disconcerting. "This is one of the stupidest things I have ever had the pleasure of hearing you propose."

Rhys spreads his hands and bows theatrically. "At least I never bore you."

Amren laughs, a single breath that almost convinces him she's more intrigued than displeased. Almost. Her eyes haven't lost their eternal coolness, their dagger-sharp edge. "You would risk your city for this girl. That, ultimately, is what it comes down to. And do not tell me," she meets Mor's eyes as though sensing a coming rebuttal, "that is not what this is. This is setting a dangerous precedent, to choose her above the place your ancestors have died to protect."

"Amren," Mor sighs, playing with a buckle on her knife sheath. "Can't you give him a break? He's just trying to save the girl he loves."

"It's a mating bond, not an undying romance." Rhys rubs his temples, exhausted already. He had to tell them, both of them, about it when he got back to the city because they're powerful enough that they were going to sense it anyway and he respects them too much to hide it from them. He's seen how these types of bonds affect people; he grew up with one. They're his Second and his Third, and if his incapacitation could influence his domain, then they need to be aware of it and help him curb if it he pushes too hard. Perhaps like he's doing now. "If you recall my parents, it's not impossible to be mated to someone and also be utterly miserable about it."

Mor crosses her arms. She came to this meeting dressed to the nines and bruising for a fight, like she already knows what he's going to ask of her. "It's just that Rhys has given so much already. He's kept us secret all by himself for fifty years. And it's not like we're going to announce to the world, hey, look, there's a super ancient and undiscovered city up here, come visit! We all know that Velaris has got to stay hidden. What we're saying is, let's take a calculated risk."

"No one is saying that." Amren's eyes narrow and her fingers tap out a steady rhythm on the terrace table. "And it would do well for you to remember the issue at hand is not Feyre Cursebreaker, but our High Lord."

Mor waves this away. "If we wait for Rhys to stop having issues then we'll never rescue her."

"As astounding as your faith is in me, cousin, that's not what she meant." Rhys takes a map of Prythian from inside his jacket and spreads it out. "Amren is very helpfully pointing out that if I choose to do this then I endanger Velaris, not just this one time but potentially over and over. I'll have chosen Feyre over the city once, and it'll make it that much easier for me to choose her again."

The hard metal tint of Amren's eyes glimmers in the twilight, like something ancient, something _more_ , moves beyond her physical body. "It is not a decision to be made lightly."

"I know." He breathes in, Feyre's claustrophobia eating away at the edges of the bond. She's going to be alone and she's terrified. Tamlin sealed the door and he sealed the path to the gardens and she's rushing to a window. They all tell her that she's suffered enough, that it's time for her to stop fighting so hard and let them take care of her, but all the people in that Court do is make her relive it.

And yes, he admits, he's tired of it. He is so sick and tired of being quiet and not saying anything, so tired that he can only wait until crises like this or the wedding to act because he doesn't want to make her choices for her.

She needs space to be able to choose what she wants. And that, at least, he can give.

Feyre's fear spikes through him as she pushes open a window. And the truth of it is, even if they weren't mates, he knows too well what this is like not to help her. How when she finds the window's blocked off from her too, how everything's sealed, she's trapped, and gods, how easily the darkness pours out of her and swallows her up-

"But I'm afraid this time I'm going to have to insist." Rhys rubs his temple, putting his own shield more firmly in place against Feyre's panicky onslaught. "If I endanger the city too much, I give you permission to take whatever actions against me you deem necessary."

There is a brief moment when Amren's lips curve up, a little too dangerously, and then it's gone. "Very well," she says. "Then we do this by the book."

"Yes, that was exactly my thinking." Rhys sprawls in one of the terrace chairs. It's not like he can't stand and keep an eye on Feyre at the same time, but he doesn't know how hard he's going to have to shield and he needs to keep it together for as much of this meeting as he can. "Which means, as High Lord, I can't be directly involved."

It grates on him, that he can't even rescue her for real this time. That the only time he's allowed to take her away from that miserable court is when it's all pomp and circumstance, an act. When they break Feyre out for real, he'll be somewhere else. It'll be orchestrated from afar and bloodless.

"So then you wait in...where's closest? Summer? Okay, so we winnow there and take the tunnel in to the Spring Court." Mor traces out their path on the map. "And as Rhys can't go in himself, I'd say I best fit the role of lead henchfaerie. We can misdirect Spring to suspect my family instead. Everyone knows how closely I associate with the Nightmare Court."

"Kindly don't call it that when you're visiting Tamlin's place."

"I know, I know. Cauldron, Rhys, you'd think I'd never abducted anyone before."

"Children," says Amren, "I have a dinner engagement."

Mor shudders, and even though it's not exactly appetizing to Rhys to imagine what Amren's got waiting for her either, they hash out the rest of the plan: how Rhys will break through Tamlin's shield, how Mor will go in after and winnow out with Feyre to the field they picked out on the map, where Rhys will be waiting and the handoff will occur while Mor deals with any potential followers.

Mor nods. "Quick, clean, and by the book. I like it."

"You owe me something nice, High Lord." Amren leans back in her terrace chair. Seated, it's more apparent how coiled she is, a viper waiting. He experiences a moment of gratitude that they're friends and not enemies. "Please keep that in mind."

"Rest assured," Rhys says, "I will."

-o-

So they do it by the book.

They winnow into the Summer Court's territory near the cave and, after getting a thumbs-up from Mor, Rhys slices through Tamlin's shield in a satisfying stroke. "Go," he says, and Mor salutes and then is off, running through the cave at a steady pace. After a few moments, she disappears and a few seconds more he can't hear her footfalls.

Rhys shifts his weight from leg to leg. It's not like he's nervous being here: it's Summer, for one thing, and no one in that whole court would give him grief for standing in a field of strawberries by the ocean.

It's just that this is always how it is with him: set the main players into motion, map out all the action for his pieces on the board, then sit back and wait. This is what they don't tell you about chess- it's the worst thing in the world being the king, telling everyone to go but never being able to move far yourself for fear of capture or inciting others into war.

Being Under the Mountain is not something he'll ever want to repeat, but the one thing he did like about it was being the principal actor. It was not easy to survive, to maneuver himself as a piece and tactician at the same time, but he'd done it.

Mor probably has a clean route to Feyre. He dips into the unprotected heads of a few guards on the perimeter of Tamlin's estate, and tastes the prickle of their surprise secondhand as Mor dashes out of the woods and up the courtyard. Sometimes she knocks them out and Rhys has to find other people to watch through, but it's an old daemati trick and he's very practiced.

She's able to get in surprisingly fast, and for a moment he wonders if he's not the only one invested in Feyre's well-being.

But then again, Mor also knows what it's like to be trapped.

Feyre is a whirl of darkness and scything shadows and her panic needles through him from all angles, even watching from behind the scenes of a maid's head. In his own body, Rhys paces through the flowers, red fruit tapping at his calves. He sees Mor wink before the last conscious person in the Spring Court slumps into slumber, and she scoops up Feyre. First objective complete.

Now, he has to wait for her to come back.

There's no one left awake to watch through anymore, and a cursory sweep of Tamlin's lands assures him that Tamlin's still too far out with his riders to come each them in time. The High Lord of the Spring Court will have felt his shield go down, that much is for sure, but even with Tamlin's speed he'd have to be going at a breakneck pace to stop them now. He and Amren calculated it out and made sure there would be a wide enough margin for error.

Rhys has to repeat this to himself several times.

To his surprise, his palms are sweaty. He snorts. Of course he's invested in this. He's had to rope his Second into okaying the plan and his Third is rushing through enemy territory for him. With Feyre, who is quietly imploding, had made herself darkness so vicious in the center of the manor it could rival his own.

At last, he hears something moving through the tunnel and Mor flashes him a grin. In her arms is Feyre, shadows still clinging to her, but safe. Free. "We've got some people on our tail, but on the whole it was a piece of cake abduction."

Rhys makes a low noise in his throat before he can stop himself. Mor transfers Feyre to his arms.

"Relax, I did it completely by the book." She turns back to the cave. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have some loose ends to wrap up."

Rhys looks down at Feyre in his arms. He couldn't convince her to stay the last time he ran off with her, and after this it will be harder for him to spirit her away again. Tamlin will catch on, there will be more guards, and even Amren will ask him coolly how necessary this really is, if he can live without it. He will either convince Feyre to stay this time or he will not.

There is not going to be an in-between.

He plucks the last shadows away and whisks them through the air and back to the Night Court in a calm but steady darkness. On the way, Feyre falls asleep against his chest and he almost doesn't want this to stop.

-o-

The armchair is not exactly comfortable, but it's better than nothing.

Rhys shifts positions as the sun rises and a stray breeze plays with the diaphanous curtains in the living room. The windows here are floor-to-ceiling, and it's the only one he could think of that he could make appear as open as possible. And he's watched her as she slept, to make sure she didn't jolt awake with no one around, no one who could tell her what happened, quell her panic, or curb her explosive darkness should she not recognize her surroundings and react defensively.

All told, it's been a long but quiet span of hours. He wrapped her in blankets and made sure the couch was comfortable. Stifling a yawn with one hand and with the other on a beige armrest, he returns his attention to the window.

What probably surprises him the most is that anyone could be around Feyre for so long and not pick up on what was happening. Her arms and legs are thin, her face is hollowed out in places that the morning light scoops stark shadows into. Even her lips are ashen.

There had been a time that Rhys thought she was just sleeping whenever during her weeks here because she didn't want to see him. That she just wanted to escape him and everything he reminded her of by any means possible, and that the means she'd chosen were books and unconsciousness. But it's clear it's something different. She's not thin because she's been worrying herself away over Tamlin and getting back to the Spring Court, it's because there has been something wrong.

Rhys traces a finger over the brass fasteners binding the fabric to the wood of the chair, waiting. Amren's covered all his meetings ("Of course this was going to happen."), Mor's out celebrating her latest daring heist, and here he is still, the one who couldn't do anything but wait.

Sometimes, even with his powers back, he feels so powerless he can't stand it.

The edge of the sun crests over the tallest peak in his domain and the dawn paints the room in rose and gold. He has had to play by the rules even when he knows who it hurts and how it hurts her, that the person Feyre had trusted was only interested in protecting her for the sake of having someone to safeguard, not in what would help her.

He can feel his wings cut shadows behind him in the armchair, not physically present but not fully hidden either.

There is a sound from the couch, a rustling of blankets, and Rhys can't quite wipe his disdain off his face before Feyre wakes up. She looks around, vaguely disoriented. "Where is this?"

"My living room." He rolls his shoulders and winces. Damn. He hadn't expected to stay this long, thought that he'd get up and return to his work after he'd assured himself that she was all right, but as soon as he'd sat down he couldn't leave, knew had to make sure she woke up and knew she was okay. He clears his throat, rough with disuse. "Welcome back."

Feyre quietly pulls herself upright, connecting circumstances and implications. "Did you-"

"No," Rhys does not hesitate. "As the High Lord of the Night Court, it would have made things very complicated very quickly if I'd set foot in Tamlin's territory to take you during a time that was not mandated by our bargain. And as I would prefer not to draw the ire of the Spring Court right now, we did things by the book. Mor had to bring you out of Tamlin's court under her own power in order for us to avoid making several people very angry."

Feyre raises an eyebrow.

"Well, all right, they're still very angry." Rhys corrects. "But they don't have any sanctioned or justifiable recourse to take action against me, so that's the next best thing. What's really important is you're out. You're free."

The words sink in and he can almost see something flicker in her eyes. "For a week," she says.

"For as long as you like." He stands and stretches, massaging out a kink in his shoulder and banishing the shadow of wings from behind him. Cauldron, he can't keep getting this riled in front of her. He's supposed to be the self-assured asshole she remembers- it shouldn't be so hard to pull that off. "Since this is technically not part of your bargain with me, you are not technically obligated to leave." He purses his lips together, suddenly on less firm ground. "If you don't want to."

It shouldn't make him feel like this, like he's offering something he's sure will be turned down, but it does.

"I," Feyre says, jaw set. "I don't think I'd want to go back. Not for a while."

There is no emerald and gold ring on her finger. And for a moment he just stands there, stupidly, kind of looking at her hand, kind of not. Then the dull twinge of his shoulder brings him back to the present.

"Of course, you're welcome in my court as long as you like. As always, my servants will attend you." Rhys moves to the window and throws back the curtains. "And in the meantime, I have some business to attend to in other parts of my court. I'll see you in a week or so."

Because really, who would want to hang around the person who wrecked her marriage? Rhys can answer that question without any help: no one. He arches his body through the window, one foot on the sill, one inside, just about to push off and fly when-

"Take me with you." Feyre says.

He is caught between cool dawn and gauzy curtains fluttering around him like ghosts. "What?"

"I've rested for a while." She pushes off the couch, blankets sliding over her thin limbs. She still looks out of place here, wrapped up in his linen, sporting a slight case of bedhead, but Rhys quickly decides he could get used to this version of Feyre. "I want to go with you, wherever you're going." She pauses and her eyes don't meet his. "I don't think I want to be alone for a while."

There is something dry in the back of his throat. He watches her from the window sill, surrounded by these ridiculous curtains, on the cusp of leaving. And he sees what he's looking for, the fading stars glimmering in her eyes.

"You'd have to promise to keep it secret. Actually secret." Not like the last time, he tells her, when she told Lucien and Tamlin about his maps or when they worked through every set of rooms that Feyre had walked through to form as accurate a picture of the Night Court as they could. "This isn't something that you can promise and take back. This is a secret that will hurt."

Amren is going to kill him. And maybe she's right. Maybe he is always going to keep endangering his city because of this girl.

But when Feyre nods, agrees to every term and every condition he lists to keep his city safe, he can't help it. Rhys leans back against the window sill like a phantom, like a thief, and grins, sharp and dangerous. It's all bets and weighing outcomes, and he's developed quite a reputation for picking the right people when he decides to risk everything. "Then hurry up and be ready downstairs in ten minutes. I don't want to be late."

Feyre stands, already looking for clothes before his words sink in. She pauses, holding up a satiny tunic and frowning. "But we're already in the Night Court. Where are we going?"

"To Velaris," Rhys says with his gambler's smile, "the City of Starlight."

* * *

 **Author's Note:** Thanks for reading, everyone! Wow, an update a week? Twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern, right? We'll have to see if I pull it together next time, lol. Fun fact: this chapter's theme song was "Laid Low" by The Naked and Famous. I'm excited to finally get to write Feyre having a more active (and less sad) role again soon!

As always, thanks for all the great reviews! A few replies:

 _Fanfic Lover 2959_ : Right? I love being in his head. Actually, I'm super curious how ACOTAR3's going to go down- part of me thinks that it might be over two POVs (Feyre's and Rhys'). I'm not sure how I feel about that, so I'm kind of hoping it stays in Feyre's head. And thanks! I feel like he gets to be such a badass (albeit like, a really frustrated badass) that he's the most fun to write.

 _Magdalena_ : Thank you so much! Confession: I originally shipped Feyre with Tamlin when I started reading the first book, but as soon as I got to Rhys Under the Mountain I was all aboard the good ship FeyRhys. I'm so happy you like my take on him!

 _Emotwin03_ : Haha, I'm so glad this made your day! Sometimes I still can't believe this ship is canon and I start smiling all goofily because these two are just so cute together.

 _Martianmojo_ : *salutes* I'll do my best! Thanks for cheering me on.

 _Flareon_ : Oh man, I love their banter. There's a drawing floating around of the scene where she throws the shoes at him (check Sarah J. Maas' twitter or google for it, it's wonderful) and I died when I saw that. I think we're out of the woods for a while (hahaha, she says, preparing to make them suffer more later) so look forward to a little more fluffiness in coming chapters.

What scenes from ACOMAF are you guys most looking forward to seeing from Rhys' POV? I have a few favorites I'm hyped about writing (not telling! it's a surprise) but I'd love to hear what everyone else likes. Hope you guys enjoyed the longer chapter this time around!

-cy.


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